All of us, in the United States at least, have been taught that life began in the oceans, starting from single-celled organisms and ending with more complex organisms living in an ecosystem. When the oceans receded to icebergs at the poles, creating more landmass, organisms began to crawl out of the water onto land. Plants, animals, and insects became more complex and specialized to adapt to their environments and social structures. However, one genus of organism decided to head back to the ocean.
This knowledge came to me quite recently through the television show NOVA: When Whales Could Walk. It was not a popular idea when first hypothesized so much evidence had to be collected. There appears to be a fossil record in South America where the land-based whale skeleton had legs. Other fossil records elsewhere showed a mammal that spent more and more time in the water. The cousin of that creature is the hippopotamus and they have many physical simularities such as webbed hooves. The other evidence was from a dead pilot whale that had washed up on shore, a rare event. A whale expert worked with an evolutionary biologist to perform an autopsy on the small, unfortunate creature. What they found defied what would be expected of a sea-based organism. Some of you may be aware of the unique type of multi-chambered stomach that ungulates (cows) have because they must digest the part of the plant that humans call “fiber”. This pilot whale had that type of stomach, though it is not an herbivore. Another clue was a small bone near what would have been the whale’s hip but unattached to the skeleton, what the scientists said was a leg bone. There is also how whales and dolphins swim: they use their flukes in an up-and-down motion, mimicking walking rather than the side-to-side motion of fish.
As fascinating as this is, what does it have to do with ESP? Simple: we can find clues in the human and animal record about it. We have a fossil and a written record of our development from the common ape ancestor to where we are now. We can compare ourselves to the mammals closest to us (apes) and other animals we consider intelligent (e.g. whales, dolphins, elephants). We can discuss the animal communication questions with scientists and with tested animal communicators (the psychic ones, not the behaviorists). Animals use many forms of communication such as chemical scent and vocalizations. Woodpeckers will find a high-tension tower and use rapid pecking to communicate with other woodpeckers. Dogs pee on anything and everything to leave a message for other dogs. Birds, especially those living in very thick vegetation, have brightly colored plumage to communicate health and vitality to their females. Squirrels will climb into the trees and send out a warning to other squirrels that a predator is on the loose.
However, no animal has the capacity for very specific meaning in their communication except for humans. We speak and write our information to one another using complex social, sentence structure, and vocabulary conveying nuanced meaning depending on inflexion. Then we developed methods for communicating across distances first with the written language, then through telegraph and telephone, now through Zoom and social media which is almost instantaneous though it may come from the other side of the globe. The potential need for telepathic communication may have gone the way of smoke signals because there was a better, more specific and easier way to communicate.
I may be what is called a panpsychist which is a person that believes all of nature has some level of awareness or consciousness. I specifically think that all of creation has access to a field, force or some other natural aspect that I like to call the information field. Animals may communicate with one another using animal telepathy and it doesn’t require knowledge of the other’s specific language. There really is a dearth of scientific inquiry regarding animal psi but there is one scientist who has looked into it and who has proposed experiments to strengthen the claim. Dr. Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist from Cambridge University who has a theory called Morphic Resonance which I recommend you read about, or watch the videos on the website. He looked into dogs who know when their owners are coming home, and N’Kisi, an African Grey parrot who seemed to know what her human companion was thinking and could use human language to describe it. You may own a pet and they may be eerily able to read your mind.
We can also go to archeologists and anthropologists for the question about psychic ability amongst people who live without technology or who embrace the older or ancestral systems. A book called Anthropology and Psychic Research goes into some of these written accounts and a current anthropologist named Jack Hunter goes into the cultural, ritual processes involved with unexplained phenomena.
The last step is to test ourselves. What parapsychologists already know is that telepathy and clairvoyance are both quite subliminal, not in our faces, just a quiet voice. Our world has become attention-grabbing in so many ways, it’s hard just to hear someone speaking to us much less pick up on ESP. It has become so pervasive that parapsychologists use a technique called ganzfeld to remove exposure to outside stimuli. If you take time to quiet your mind through meditation and want to have these types of communications, you can see for yourself if ESP is part of human communication.