Co-option of Intuition and Telepathy
YouTube video and Soundcloud audio available.
Like most things, intuition and telepathy can be co-opted and used to further territorialize our interactions with one another and the spiritual work we do. It would be negligent of me to not address the cannibalizing nature of telepathic solidarity which is both creepy and problematic.
It is a different form of what bell hooks calls, "consuming the Other." Though here, we now have the potential to psychically consume non-humans as well, including thoughts and emotions.
For those who are really good at reading energy, telepathic solidarity can in a sense relocate surveillance to psychic fields. The ability to receive information about others, and to sense, feel, and know things about them, is in a sense, a sensory intrusion that blurs private and public. Furthermore, because of its subjective nature, translating information that cannot be proven as anything other than subjectively real in an embodied intuitive knowing-feeling type of way is in many ways, a farce.
I raise queer disability justice organizer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2015) who in her memoir Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, shares that since she was a child, she sometimes receives intuitive messages about other people’s trauma.
Leah writes: “when I was a kid, I could always tell who were the survivor girls. It was a special talent. Some kids played tennis or were really good at video games. I could look at kids in the hall between classes and could tell who was being molested” (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2015:69).
Unless these other “kids” Leah speaks of, testified for themselves that they were being molested, there is no real and actual way of knowing or proving that what Leah calls, “special talents” are true. In this regard, it would be erroneous to suggest that we can derive any objective conclusion from intuition or telepathy.
Intuition and telepathy will not hold in court. Of course, science and the legal system would argue that such subjective experiences are not actual or real. But rather, a function of delusion as a result of a malfunctioning brain and its scrambled neurology, philosophical constructs, and far-gone imagination, perhaps even mental illness.
There will also be those who will use intuition and telepathy to make erroneous claims in the name of extra/multi/hyper-sensory abilities. Deciphering between those who actually embody intuition (and well), from those who simply claim to, is difficult. In addition, we decode data based on what we already know so to speak.
Even when receiving new information that has never been known before, the message pulls on familiar images, memories, and feeling sensations in order for us to make connections, Brené Brown wrote about this. As she explained, “psychologists believe that intuition is a rapid-fire, unconscious associating process-like a mental puzzle. [Where] the brain makes an observation, scans its files, and matches the observation with existing memories, knowledge, and experiences. Once it puts together a series of matches, we get a “gut on what we’ve observed” (87-8).
In this way, decoding and making sense of data carried in energy is culturally (if not, individually) specific. Further to this, working with and decoding emotions like fear is extremely difficult for the very reason that fear and intuition, are in many ways mutually exclusive.
It is nearly impossible to clearly utilize intuition when embodying or feeling fear. The two do not match vibrationally.
As the idiom goes, “F.E.A.R. is false evidence appearing real”. This is precisely what happens when we attempt to read fear when in fear. False evidence is decoded as real and explained away as intuition.
Reading fear (with little to no experience) is not only extremely painful and retraumatizing, but it will also result in inaccurate and wrong readings, what is in the physical essentially, lies. This has to do with what fear as an emotion does to us.
It is erratic energy that disorganizes our faculties. Fear moves us with such intensity and force that we become impulsive and illogical. It is only through trial and error, training, and practice that we can come to shape fear without being moved by it. For these reasons, while telepathic solidarity is not based on assumptions, it acknowledges the potential to. It is not rooted in the insistence that we know best what is best for others. Or that we know precisely how or what they feel. Or that we even feel the exact same things as them. There are no experts other than the self.
Some of the best energy readers will admit that they cannot and do not know it all, nor can they speak for, or on behalf of anyone else. (Chani Nicholas talks about this in an interview with CBS in 2019). Precisely because they can never know or feel it all, is why multi/extra/hyper-sensory energy readers are constantly on a quest to know more.
Like, subscribe, and share.
Until next time, in solidarity.