As we grow ever more reliant on the wealth of communications technology, are we losing faith in our natural abilities? We can communicate with others at a distance, using only our own body-minds.
Why did we invent these communications devices in the first place? I've often thought that the underlying reason behind technologies like the telephone and the internet was to amplify the abilities we already knew we had.
I remember something interesting about the death of my grandmother, who lived thousands of miles away. When she died, my mother woke in the night startled, having sensed her passing. By the time the telephone call came in the morning with the news, Mom already "knew."
Also, like most people, I have often thought of certain people only to run into them or receive a phone call. Once when my husband was working on a graveyard shift, I woke at 4 am with a dream that his eye was bleeding, and lay wakeful until I heard his key turn in the lock, two hours early. He greeted me with a bandaged eye. "A speck flew in my eye and I had to have First Aid take it out," he said. When I asked him what time the accident happened, he replied, "About 4 am."
Even with our elderly cat, I seem to have an open communication line. As soon as I think it's about time to get him in from his brief outdoor patrols, I hear the "Let me in" meow at the same moment.
There is a certain irony in the fact that we become ever more reliant on the external manifestations while we allow our natural communicative abilities to atrophy. Perhaps it is the increase of noise around us too, that drowns out the low hum of background connections. These require attention to become perceptible.
As Ervin Laszlo says, ancient people and "primitives" knew that we were all connected. He also recalls how psychologist William James said that although, like islands, we are separate on the visible surface, we remain deeply connected beneath.
In this new century and millennium, we must and will learn that we are all one.
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