TELEPATHIC MESSAGES

This blog began with my struggles to accept the validity of a psychic experience that occurred minutes before I discovered my son had been murdered, something I wish I could forget, and ended with my letter to him, something I will remember until the day I die.

When I slog through the snow to my truck in the morning and turn the key in the ignition, I know that water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit and that the science behind the internal combustion engine is a fact, not a belief. And I know these things because I can verify them myself, anytime, anywhere without words, belief or faith.

Gravity keeps me on the ground, water flows downhill, and light travels at a constant velocity so everyone, regardless of where they are standing, sees the same thing in the same cause-and-effect sequence. My normal, everyday mindset isn't skeptical of things I can verify, directly or indirectly, time after time, because the Cosmos works the same way, time after time.

Repeatability is a cornerstone of knowing.

Paranormal claims have always been outside that mindset because they are subjective rather than objective evidence and there is no clear way to repeat the experiment or measure the results. So I dismissed paranormal claims as wishful thinking, self-delusion or superstitious nonsense...

Until the day my son was murdered.

He, his mother and I had driven to the mountains to hike and run the Pacific Crest Trail. I was training for a 50-km race. His mother was training for the 10 mile part of the event. Our son wasn't doing the race but was also a runner and came along to be with us. We left the parking lot around 8 in the morning. His mother planned to hike for an hour or so, but I wanted to run for 3 hours. Our son was tired from a week of college exams, so he decided to run with me for 20 minutes, then return to the car and wait for us.

When he and I got to his turn-around, I gave him the keys to our car. I continued up the trail to my turn-around, then started back. When I was 2 miles from the parking lot, a very dark, ominous feeling came over me. I didn't hear a voice but something inside me wanted to get back to my wife and son quickly. It was frightening and urgent — not something I could dismiss as imagination or indigestion.

When I got near the parking lot, my wife was walking around calling for our son. Not loud enough for me to hear her when I had been 2 miles away, but there was an urgency in her voice. We searched the forest and the road leading up to the trail head for an hour but never found him. Exhausted, I ran down to a nearby restaurant and called the police.

A search party found his body later that evening.

Before that tragic day, I was too busy with life to pay any attention to death. My nose was to the grindstone, my elbow was in the grease, my head was in my career, and my heart was in my family and friends. The next morning, I woke up to a new world — a world more ugly, dangerous and terrifying than the one I had known. A world darkened by questions I couldn't answer.

Who had sent that frightening message to me as I ran back to the parking area where he was killed? The message was as plain as if somebody had shouted words in my ears. Was it my wife beseeching me telepathically as she searched frantically for our son? Or my son, screaming telepathically at me while he was being killed or supernaturally after he was dead?

Where is Andy? The bliss of Heaven? The fires of Hell? The dirt of Earth? If God exists, why did he allow Andy to be murdered? What kind of a world did I think I was living in? Why did it require tragedy to wake me up?

In one of Francine Prose's novels, a character put her finger on my dilemma when she said, "The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then never again, was so impossible to fathom we kept trying to figure it out."

Yeah, I kept trying to figure it out, exploring the words of other writers that orbit the angst of life and death. "Don't cry because it's over." wrote Dr. Seuss, "Smile because it happened." Mae West said one life is enough if you do it right. Woody Allen didn't want immortality through his work. He wanted it by not dying. Another writer wrote, "We could bear the poignant truth that birds sing beautifully for a time, then become a pile of lifeless feathers if we could embrace the possibility that there are other worlds in which to sing."

As a child, I had attended church because my father drove me there every Sunday in his rusty old truck. But religion didn't stick, so I moved into adult life without gods or theology. Now, with my son buried in the ground, I went back to religion looking for answers to these questions.

Religion had answers, of course, but the answers were impossible to believe on faith alone. One morning, sitting in a church with my wife, the preacher told us to stand and sing "Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so." I had sung those words as a boy. But now, in the context of our son's death, the words rang cold and hollow. The Bible is the evidence that Jesus loves me? Words in a book? Actions make something so, not words. Words are just handles to carry the idea of something from one person to another, not the things itself. Why didn't Jesus step out of the Bible and into the world before that man killed our son?

I don't have to believe my wife loves me because I know it experientially, with my senses, not with my imagination, my wishful thinking or my self-indulgent hopes and dreams. It's her smile I see, her touch I feel, and her encouragement I hear when I'm struggling with a problem. She washes my clothes, prepares our meals and laughs at my stupid jokes. She crawls under my truck to hand me wrenches while I struggle with a bolt on the bell housing. She stands in the freezing rain with an umbrella while I am down in a ditch fixing a broken pipe.

So I walked in the front door of religion to find answers to the tragic death of my son, then walked out the back door because I couldn't make religion fit reality nor make reality fit religion. My religious friends reminded me that God's love works in mysterious ways. They were quick to add that I was suffering from sour grapes because God's will for me and my son had made me angry and bitter. Visiting my son's body in the morgue was monstrous, not mysterious. The memory of his lifeless body laying on a cold, stainless-steel table is still terrifying. Some things cannot be forgotten.

But I was suffering, and the root of my pain and confusion was the belief that a grand scheme or higher power of some kind should keep bad things from happening to good people. Faced with only blind faith to reconcile religion with reality, I decided that divine intervention was not how the world works and began looking for other ways to accept my son's death — philosophies and practices grounded in cause-and-effect evidence.

So I gradually moved away from being a cynic who had gone through a fire and been burned, and towards becoming a realist who had gone through a fire and been purged. I was learning to distinguish between knowing and believing while keeping my expectations under close scrutiny.

Steve Pavlina says we should choose to believe. We cannot prove life after death by investigating evidence outside ourselves. We can only go inside ourselves for the answer by choosing to believe it. "Work on your consciousness now," says Pavlina. "If this life is all there is, yours will be better by increasing your awareness and sensitivity to it. If consciousness survives death, your next life will be better for the same reason."

Yeah, who wouldn't want to believe they will be with their loved ones again in some cosmic consciousness, collective or otherwise? But the skeptic in me needs to set belief, disbelief, and words aside so my five senses can influence my understanding of the world. I've never been able to believe that hearing something without my ears is proof that consciousness survives death, that death does not disconnect us from this precious consciousness we call life; that we are not forever disconnected from the people we love.

I want to know, not just believe.

From a scientific point of view, telepathy is unknown because it fails the test of repeatability. Science has no tools to empirically verify telepathic communication. If I claim my experience was due to telepathy, I must invent an aspect of the universe unknown to science. Scientific facts are repeatable because they are seldom situational or circumstantial. The evidence of a scientific fact must be objective — independent of the subjective way our minds work.

So my search for answers about Andy became a flight into the theistic clouds of heaven, then a descent back to the secular clarity of earth as the sun of reality melted the religious wax on my wings. I left Eden, but not before I ate from the Tree.

Now, with the years piled up like the pages in a book, one on top of the other, I'm down here where the rubber meets the road, dealing with the world as it really is, nurturing attitudes and actions that my head can accept with rational certainty and my heart can embrace with emotional enthusiasm.

Even if psychic experiences are not a way to peer over the edge of our sensory judgments and cognitive interpretations — a way to transcend rational explanations and normal evidence — my heart continues to trump my head with the possibility that my son is, metaphorically speaking, on the other side of the moon —the side I can't see. Perhaps I will join him someday. Until then, who knows what separation we are meant to bear — normally, paranormally or supernaturally...