Introduction
I listened to an episode of The Telepathy Tapes podcast for the first time in a few months. It was on the weird phenomenon of acquired savant capabilities. It’s a fascinating show overall which began with the exploration of telepathy among people with autism.
I returned to the show after a disappointing but necessary diversion into scientific themes. By disappointing I mean not the ideas but the attitudes which still insist on redefining reported non-ordinary experiences as cognitive or perceptual malfunctions.
This is hardcore materialism at work, insisting that any report of experiences that contradict its dogma must necessarily be wrong in some fashion.
A few months ago, I’d listen to Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven [2012]. I had been aware of the book four years but never felt any inclination to read it. Alexander’s experience of a medically induced coma during which he was conscious of being elsewhere was transformative for him. His education in neurosurgery hadn’t stimulated any curiosity about the nature of human reality beyond the materialist frame. He was, until his recovery, a firm materialist. He has since coauthored Living in a Mindful Universe: a Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Heart of Consciousness with Karen Newell. Alexander now has a website on ‘Unveiling the Mystery of Consciousness’.
Below I want to reflect on intellectual, moral and concrete consequences of the dominance of such materialistic dogma. They are profound.
The politics of experience
Way back, maybe 2 decades ago I read an account of how French explorers encountered an Aboriginal woman on a beach in Western Australia. It was a first encounter for both. They touched her physically and wrote of the experience. That’s why we know it happened. But the author, Inga Clendennin, an anthropologist and historian, invited the reader to contemplate the fate of the woman when she went back to her community and told what had happened. Was she contaminated by her experience? Was she shunned or killed?
Experience which violates our norms is transgressive to the individual who has the experience as well as the community from which they come. Survivors of dramatic events have their lives changed. Sometimes they can share their experience only with others who have had the same kind of experience. This is true of many war veterans, victims of crimes or abuses, and survivors of natural catastrophes.
Communities set boundaries that say what is normal and okay and what is not. This is because mutually shared experiences form the foundation of shared survival and prosperity. We create boundaries that rule some experiences out – as taboo. Those who have transgressive experiences can be shunned, rejected, and in some cases, killed.
But we no longer live in small groups where such rules had a survival logic. We now live in large complex cultures which are diverse and pluralistic. Nobody has a right to define what is okay to experience to anywhere near the same degree anymore – but some folks just don’t get that.
Human cultures have long negotiated with the non-ordinary, recognizing that it exists and is influential and they have a need to control access or exposure to it. It is powerful and must not be permitted to contaminate the ordinary, the normal. Not everyone is okay with engaging with it. It can be genuinely terrifying. This need has led to shamanism, magic and religion. We need intermediaries sometimes, but we must also live within the embrace of the non-ordinary. It is all around us.
We humans have engaged with ‘the other side’ since our creation. It has only really been since intense urbanization, industrialization, and the rise of religious and intellectual dogmatism that we have been induced to deny it. Religions do not want their exclusivity challenged. It is the source of material wealth and political power. Materialist intellectuals don’t want their dominance of theories on what, how and why challenged. This is also a source of wealth and power.
But things are changing. The Telepathy Tapes and Eben Alexander’s writing are merely the most immediate signals to me of a change that is rippling through our culture. I could add a long list of credible thinkers, but The Telepathy Tapes is doing that already.
It really is time that we collectively restore the ‘other side’ and associated notions to the level of intellectual and moral esteem that once flourished in our cultures.
It isn’t a question of theory
The Telepathy Tapes is about experience. The podcast exists because the experiences are reported and explored. To the extent that there is theorizing it is in fidelity to the experiences, rather than an effort to reinterpret the experiences as misinterpretations or misperceptions.
I grew up having non-ordinary experiences from aged 6 that were not accommodated within the scientific or religious frameworks of the time. I was ‘mad’ or ‘bad’, depending on whose norms I had violated. In fact, I was normal – just unusual. Many people are in this situation – of being normal but unusual. But many of them do not see themselves as anything other than abnormal and flawed in some manner.
Some years ago, I described the impact of materialism and Christianity on the western psyche as a form of napalming our psychic ecology – trying to kill off anything that didn’t fit the influences of either dogma. I used the term ‘napalming’ intentionally to convey the brutality of the effort to kill off the validation of, and belief in, the ‘non-ordinary’.
The Telepathy Tapes seems to me to be a form of healing of that psychic ecology in a calm rational manner.
It’s not the only contributor to this healing. It’s just one I find particularly harmonious with my spirit. I like the intellectual discipline, the focus on experience, the acceptance of experience as not being anything other than what the reporters say it is.
What is abnormal about our culture is that we have been induced to deny and denigrate what is in fact our ageless human heritage.
What was once a balance of soul plus reason has decayed into intellect alone. Intellectualism has been misdescribed as reason – to the deep detriment of our cultures. The soul has been dismissed as the fantasy of the weak minded. Or contrived as a subject of a concocted hierarchy of divine lordship and beholden to its whims for validation.
Conclusion
When I was 15, I was given Paul Brunton’s Hidden Teachings Beyond Yoga. At the time I was struggling with non-ordinary experiences that had no place in my family’s religion nor in the science I loved.
I am in the process of rereading that book as a mature adult. My immediate reaction was that I could see why the 15-year-old me took 18 months to read it. I’d barely get through half a page if I was lucky before ‘falling asleep’. The book opened up avenues of comprehension that derailed my formal studies and sent me off on a quest to see the world ‘as it is’, not how we want it to be. The quest endures still. And the book is having the same impact now – pushing beyond what is agreed and normal into new territory that challenges our mental and emotional assumptions.
The Telepathy Tapes remind me of my 15-year-old self in that I am hearing experience-based insights that continue to crack open the hard nut of ‘the world as we have been taught to see it’. It is exciting and comforting.
I also see The Telepathy Tapes as relatable, not impelled by an extrovert ego basking in attention. The story tellers are ‘ordinary folks’. The host, Ky Dickens, is warm, inclusive, deeply disciplined and thoroughly professional.
Back in 2009 I submitted a Masters Honours thesis that I began in 2002. On an academic level it left a lot to be desired, but I got a passing grade. I had chosen the option of satisfactory/unsatisfactory over the usual grading system. It was assessed as satisfactory. My topic was an inquiry into whether animism provided an explanation for my multiple non-ordinary experiences. I found that it did. One of the things I like about The Telepathy Tapes is that it has an animistic spirit to it. It feels familiar and comfortable for that reason.
There’s a lot of thinking moving in this direction these days. A lot of it takes a very rational and scientific approach. The Telepathy Tapes engages with scientists and other thinkers in a balanced way. The show doesn’t have that hard intellectual edge esteemed by those overly keen on saying that their approach is reason-based and scientific – when it is often tainted with dogmatism. Its stories are based, originally, on relating and exploring the experiences of kids with autism, their families and the people who work with them and care for them.
This is what I love most about the show. These are normal people and families. What the accounts of their experiences tell us will be astonishing and challenging to some, but they will also be comforting and affirming to others. I am one of the latter, and it’s a darned nice feeling to be able to enjoy.
Michael Patterson
28 May 2026
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