Away with words

Does spoken language clobber our telepathic abilities?

Remember that line from Hamlet, where Hamlet is lamenting the royal aires he’s forced to put on as he hunts for his father’s killer:

Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear ⌜father⌝ murdered,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words

Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2 (link)

I never forgot that line. I used to perform soliloquies from this scene, and I was always gutted by that line: “I must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words.”

It speaks of the grossness of human language in expressing the ineffable. How utterly ham-fisted it can feel to convey an experience using words and symbols.

This line comes into sharper focus for me now, after hearing the mind-blowing podcast The Telepathy Tapes. Incredibly, non-speaking autistic people can and do communicate telepathically. Both between non-speakers, and between non-speakers and their caregivers.

The non-speakers they feature on the podcast are all able to read the minds of people caring for them (when they consent to it), and to send messages telepathically to caregivers as well. And they routinely gather in common telepathic spaces to communicate with each other.

This interview with the host of the Telepathy Tapes podcast goes into the fascinating implications of telepathy being a real phenomenon:

As I was listening to this, I noted that they feel the telepathic abilities are more connected to being a non-speaker than they are being autistic per se. That got me wondering …

Is there something about learning spoken language that precludes having a clear telepathic connection?

When I hang out on TikTok #spiritual, the manifestation folks like to say that the reason assembling letters into words is called “spelling” is because words are literally spells one is casting. If I try to make that more cogent I end babbling … something something … energy vibration … law of attraction …. something something manifestation …

I don’t know about all that.

But isn’t it fascinating that those who do not have the fine-motor control to use spoken language, seem to universally have the gift of telepathic communication. It makes me wonder if we are all born with telepathic abilities, and are somehow trained out of it in deference to learning spoken language.

Perhaps it is too painful to retain the ability to read people’s thoughts, when their thoughts and actions just don’t line up. Maybe we feel the need to turn off the telepathic connection, just to keep the signal consistent.

The non-speakers often express that they only have access to their gifts when they are coming from a place of love. You don’t get the gifts if you lie, for example. Somehow they are coherent enough to pick up on these signals consciously, while most of us are not. And for them to be able to communicate telepathically with you, you need to believe in their ability to do it. That’s interesting too. Somehow our beliefs modulate our telepathic connection.

Maybe words have an opportunity cost, as the podcast host above so eloquently puts it. Maybe words come with a tradeoff. And those whose body won’t produce those words, have found another way. So … away with words. Maybe the heart needn’t be unpacked after all.