ESP and Family Secrets

Henry Reed

Don encountered at a business convention his old flame, Peggy. They found their attraction for each other to be as intense as it had been in college. One thing led to another and they were well on their way to enjoy an intimate reunion. Then, at a crucial moment, Don awoke from this delectable dream. He had little time to nurse his disappointment, however, because his wife woke up and muttered, "Don, honey, do we know anyone named Peggy?" Don sleepily said he didn't think so and rolled over.

When Don told me this story, a new idea about a powerful motivator of ESP came to me. Telepathy seems to love to sniff out secrets!

Surveys show that spontaneous telepathy involve people who are close. It would seem as if the emotional connection between people, the bond of intimacy, provides the channel for telepathic communication. Laboratory studies support this impression. Friends and intimates perform better in ESP experiments than do strangers.

Nothing seems to pull on the emotional strings that tie people together like trouble that threatens the bond between them. A mother senses her child is in trouble and rushes to the scene just in time. A husband feels there's something wrong at home and calls. The ringing of the phone awakens his wife who was drifting asleep from leaking gas.

Louisa Rhine, wife of the founder of America's first ESP laboratory, at Duke University, received thousands of letters detailing stories such as these. Accidents, deaths, illnesses, these and other threats to loved ones were precipitators of ESP. "Crisis ESP" is the name given to what is perhaps the most common context for spontaneous telepathy.

Although crises such as accidents and deaths may be the largest known source of ESP, secrets may actually be an even more common, although unknown, unrecognized or unacknowledged culprit. As Don's story suggests, secrets might stimulate ESP. In the case of secrets, however, the very same reason that motivates the original secrecy, may also suppress the acknowledgement of the ESP!

Looking for some corroboration of this idea, I searched through Louisa Rhine's collection of case studies of spontaneous ESP as found in her books, ESP in Life and Lab, Hidden Dimensions of the Mind, and The Invisible Picture. I did find a few stories similar to Don's, showing that a wife can be quite sensitive to her husband's wandering feelings.

A wife who had never really known jealousy of her husband, for example, had a dream where she saw him leaning against a wall with a woman in front of him. He had both of his arms around her and they were talking and laughing. The next day she asked her husband in a joking sort of way, "If you were against a wall last night standing with a woman holding her in your arms, who might that woman be?" He laughed and said, "I didn't do anything wrong honey, that was just the waitress at the restaurant. She came over to me and said "how's my sweetie?" How did you happen to know?" The wife started to tell him the dream but then for some reason decided that she didn't want him to know about it. So she said she just happened to have gone down for a cup of coffee and happened to see him there.

In relationships, secrets can be a form of lying. Keeping certain facts hidden can be a form of deception. It also is a barrier to intimacy. As a relationship is forming, and curiosity is high, such secrets may be especially vulnerable to detection.

Louisa Rhine tells the story of a woman working as a waitress in a cafeteria who met a young man who flirted with her. They went out on a date and fell in love. One day he said he had to make a business trip to Boston but would return in a week. That night, she had a dream in which she saw a "sad, frail woman with dark brown hair and in the last stages of pregnancy" who told her that she was the man's wife. The next day, the waitress happened to hear from somebody that the man had not gone on a business trip, but was going to see his wife who, he had learned, was about to have a baby. When the man did return she confronted him with this information, and learned that it was the truth.

In another case, it was the man who wrote to Louisa. He was away from home on a business trip with friends. They ran into some girls and he became somewhat smitten with one of them. After that trip he phoned her a couple of times from his home town. The next time he traveled to New York, he called her, they had a date and they ended up spending the night together. When they woke up the next morning, she had what she thought was a funny dream, which she told him. In her dream, she saw the man was married to a slim woman with dark hair and a black tooth in front of her mouth. She described their house on the waterfront with its array of boats. In the dream, the couple's daughter came up to the dreamer and said, "Oh, you go out with my father." Hearing this dream shocked the man because everything, with the exception of children, was accurate. He didn't let on that the dream was accurate, but began to distance himself from the woman and gradually broke off the relationship. She never knew her dream was psychic.

The child's innocent reaction in the woman's dream rings a bell in our sleuthing for secrets exposed through ESP. Children have a way of voicing what is intended to remain silent, as in the infamous exclamation, "The emperor has no clothes!" Most any parent will testify that their children seem to be past masters at picking up or reacting to the parent's thoughts and feelings.

Just how closely children are tuned into their parents has been amply documented by Berthold Schwarz. In his book, Parent-Child Telepathy this psychiatrist presented the diary he and his wife kept of the ESP that occurred between themselves and their own children.

ESP made it hard for Dr. and Mrs. Schwarz to keep presents a secret from their children. Little Lisa, whose birthday near Thanksgiving was but a month away from Christmas, seemed especially telepathic about presents. When Lisa was about to have her second birthday, mom was looking at Dad's appointment book, and was thinking about writing in Lisa's birthday. At that very moment, Lisa announced, "Draw a birthday cake!" When the parents discussed wrapping Christmas presents for the children next door, Lisa started talking to herself about a truck with little cars in a garage and then went on to talk about putting her cereal in an oven. They were astounded to hear this as one of the presents they had bought for the boy next door was a toy car transport truck and a toy oven for Lisa. They were locked away in separate boxes in a closet in dad's office. Upon hearing Lisa's fantasy, they went and checked on the boxes, which were securely unopened. One fall morning, just before she turned five, Lisa announced, "Last night I dreamed of a spinning wheel! Lisa wants a spinning wheel for Christmas!" The day before, mother had been out shopping and saw a spinning wheel and bought it for Lisa. She didn't bring it into the house until the children were in bed.

Another common type of secret-baring telepathy was the the Schwarz children's knack for suddenly making a comment aloud that seemed as if in direct response to something one of the parents was silently thinking. In one instance, when Lisa was three, she and mom were resting together in bed. Lisa was holding a Santa Claus doll and talking to it about what she wanted for Christmas. Mother was trying to fall off asleep and was thinking about how her children had grown so much. As she thought to herself, "I have no baby anymore," Lisa asked her, "Do you want Santa to bring you a baby sister?" Mother was surprised because the daughter had never, to her knowledge, mentioned a baby sister before.

As any parent can attest, sometimes children's questions can probe into embarrassing areas. Imagine what it must have been like, then, at the Schwarz house, when the children's questions probed thoughts the parents were keeping to themselves.

The family was sitting around the dinner table. Dad's quietly thinking to himself. Nine year old Lisa asked mom how come Dad's not talking. Mom says he has a sore throat and is saving his voice. In fact, however, he was thinking over a letter he received from a friend asking for his intervention in a touchy situation. He was imagining just how he could diplomatically navigate through the mess without hurting any feelings. Just then, Lisa asked, "Mother, is there such a word as 'diplomatics'?" That word brought father out of his reverie. He asked her, "Why would you say that?" She said, "I don't know I just made it up." Lisa didn't know what the word meant and had to go look it up in the dictionary.

Among family members, a secret can be its own kind of crisis. A family is bound by intimacy. Several individuals become one functioning unit. Secrets, whatever their nature, create boundaries between the individual family members. ESP serves to bridge these boundaries and keep the bond intact.

Not only are parents sensitive to dangers confronting their children, but children can have a telepathic capacity to be alert to threats to the well-being of their parents. Parents often try to shield their children from their problems or worries, but the secrecy almost seems like a magnet to attract the child's attention.

Dr. Schwarz writes of a time when he and his wife were in the kitchen discussing their budget because of pressing financial concerns. Suddenly their daughter's voice comes over the intercom announcing, "Mommy, see my art show! I will sell pictures, $2 a piece! Invite friends you don't know and Eric will invite children from school." Lisa was five years old at the time and Dr. Schwarz noted that several months ago she had seen on television the story of Hans Brinker. She was impressed by the way little children could earn money to help their impoverished family. Lisa, however, had no idea of her parents' financial worries because they had always made a point of keeping those matters away from their children.

Sometimes secrets consist of momentary feelings, such as anger, that the person doesn't feel comfortable about expressing. At a subconscious level, however, other family members may perceive the existence of such secret feelings as a threat to togetherness. That threat may motivate the use of ESP to breach the secret and restore intimacy.

Dr. Schwarz recorded an instance where he was upset with his wife. He was feeling secretly angry and thought he'd better leave their summer retreat and get back to his city office before there was some big fight. Just as he was making this secret decision to leave earlier than would normally be the plan, six year old daughter Lisa walked up to him and said "Daddy, are you leaving today?" Gottcha!--Caught in the act of his secret thoughts, he had no choice but to reconsider.

I was excited to find that Dr. Schwarz noted in his book that on many occasions, the nature of the coincidental remark made by the child was of such a surprising personal nature that he had a hard time recording it for his study. As the children grew older, this sort of thing happened more and more often.

Certainly the Schwarz family record supports the idea that secrets can be a prime motivator of telepathy. Furthermore, if ESP serves to maintain subconscious, intimate contact among family members when the people involved might not otherwise choose to openly discuss certain matters, then it is likely that there is a large pool of ESP cases that never come to light. Don didn't reveal to his wife Peggy, for example, that her comment had been psychic. The ESP remained a secret known only to him. His wife's veiled message nevertheless hit the mark.

Some parapsychologists have speculated that one reason it has been so hard to establish credibility for ESP is the factor of fear. Among other things, ESP represents a threat to secrecy and becomes a potential for invasion of privacy. It would be ironic, therefore, if one of the main motivators of everyday ESP events also serves as a powerful motivator to suppress the evidence for ESP.

Amused and animated by this potential irony, I decided to go out on my own search for examples of ESP exposing secrets, to see how hard it might be to find them. For my first attempt, I approached someone who I thought would have a number of ESP type coincidences to share. I asked her, "Have you ever had an experience where your children or spouse made an off the wall comment, or perhaps told you a bit of a dream, that made you realize that they, perhaps without knowing it themselves, had tapped into a secret of yours--that they seemed to be picking up on something that you wished they hadn't?" The woman looked at me, paused, then a stern look came upon her face. She said, "Yes, that happened to me once, with one of my daughters." She blushed, she said, "But it is too personal to tell you about!"

Although this person gave me no story for my research, her reaction was more than enough confirmation for my idea. In fact, it seemed like a synchronistic blessing, convincing me that there is a large pool of personal experiences out there related to the unwanted exposure of secrets through ESP. I therefore placed a notice in my "Psi Research" column in Venture Inward magazine about my ideas concerning the role of ESP in uncovering family secrets. I encouraged people to come forward with their stories, even anonymously.

I quickly received over twenty letters in reply. Most concerned marital infidelities. The second most frequent category were adults having dreams about secrets their parents kept from them as children--I guess children never really grow beyond the ability to discover their parent's secrets. There were a couple concerning realizing someone was pregnant, or health concerns and a few miscellaneous topics, including two claiming the revelation of undetected murders!

One of the first letters I received in response came unsigned, but was clearly from a woman. She didn't mention the nature of the secret that had been exposed. The tone of the letter showed that the she still felt a great deal of hurt from the secret she had uncovered through a dream. It was a recent event, and still hurt.

Extramarital contacts seem to be a potent source for telepathic secret-smashing. One woman wrote me about how she uncovered her husband's affair through dreams. She had a dream where he told her that he loved another woman. She woke up crying from the dream and her husband comforted her, assuring there was no basis to the dream. Later, however, he confessed. When he did so, he said to her the exact words she had heard him say in her dream.

Another woman wrote to me that twice she dreamed of her husband's infidelities. In both cases, when she told him the dream, the details were so surprisingly accurate, he involuntarily confessed on the spot. A few years later, she had a similar experience, but without the aid of a dream. In this case, he had been staying late at work, complaining that they had been unable to hire extra help for the summer. One night when he came home, she heard a voice in her shout out, and she repeated it aloud, "who is the new person who's working with you?" She was surprised to hear her say these words, for they were in direct contradiction to what her husband had been telling her. He confessed that they did have extra help. It was a woman and she and he were having an affair.

Human feelings being as they are, it is not that uncommon for people to have a jealousy dream in which they see their spouse or lover entangled with someone else. It would make good sense to treat such dreams as pictures of our own worries. Consider this dream, for example, sent to me by a woman from Massachusetts:

"My husband and I were in a gray stone castle. I was standing on a balcony looking down over a huge ballroom. At least a hundred people were dancing. It was a breathtakingly beautiful sight like a fabulous theatrical production. I went to look for my husband. I walked into a room and saw him there with a half-dressed woman. They were as startled to see me as I was to see them. Then, with a smirk on her face, the woman told me she was a lawyer who had come to consult with my husband on a legal matter. He backed up her ridiculous story. My shock and anger now turned to fury and the woman became afraid of me. She grabbed her dress, coat and handbag and ran from the room."

The wife thought the dream was "only symbolic." Two weeks later, however, when she and her husband were out shopping at a large mall, a woman came running up to them. She created a very loud and humiliating scene. From the woman's remarks it was clear that she was involved with our dreamer's husband. The wife was amazed at this revelation and gave the woman quite a stare--who was this woman? Suddenly the wife recognized her: she was the woman of her dream!

Another woman wrote that one day a good friend phoned her, quite upset, and relayed this story: After eight years of marriage, she fell in love with her husband's brother. She kept these feelings to herself for a long time, but one day, the brother came over to the house and they had an intimate encounter. Within five minutes of their liaison, the phone rang. It was the woman's husband. He cried out over the phone, "Did you just make love to somebody?" The wife was overwhelmed with disbelief. All she could do was reply, "What?" The husband said, "I know this sounds crazy, but I just had this incredibly strong feeling that you were with another man." The phone call left the wife stunned and she picked up the phone and recounted the incident to her friend, confessing the whole story.

One woman wrote me about a dinner conversation with her husband that proved surprising. She found herself blurting out of the blue some derogatory comments about a woman her husband knew. She thought it odd, as she hadn't seen or heard of this woman for over a year. Her husband was surprised too, so surprised, in fact, that he confessed that he had a sexual encounter with that woman just that afternoon.

In this case, the wife didn't know her remarks were telepathically motivated until the husband's response. Her making spontaneous comments with no apparent reason is quite reminiscent, when you think about it, of the many examples told by Dr. Schwarz about his children. As we saw, his children would make innocent remarks, unknowingly telepathic, yet have no understanding of why they said the things they did. This woman's story shows that this form of telepathic response is certainly not limited to children.

Pregnancies are also a source of telepathic events. I received a letter from a woman who told about her sister who once made an unexpected visit. Her wedding had been mysteriously cancelled, but she didn't want to talk about it. Only after the sister left did it dawn on the woman that her sister was pregnant. She called her, exposed the secret and offered to help. The revelation allowed her sister to open up and reveal all that had been troubling her.

A woman from Virginia wrote me that during her pregnancy, she and her husband were discussing the effects of child bearing upon the body. Relative to the topic of the mother's genetic inheritance the husband asked about how his sister-in-law had fared with her baby. The wife was surprised at the question, as her sister had no children--at least as far as the husband knew. The truth of the matter was that years before she and her husband met, her sister had a child out of wedlock and gave it up for adoption. It was a well kept family secret--at least that is what this woman thought until her husband's "innocent" question.

Many parents wrote me confirming the impression that children often seem psychic about presents heading their way. I received one story of a gift for an adult identified through ESP. A grown woman is back with her parents at Christmas. They are about finished with the present exchanging, when Dad announces that he has one more gift, a special one for his wife, "something you've always wanted." At that remark, the daughter blurts out, "The brooch!" Indeed it was the brooch, a piece of jewelry that mom had lost twelve years before. Dad had recently found it behind a book and kept it for a Christmas surprise. Just like Schwarz's children, the child in this woman could sense the present before it was opened, even though it wasn't for her.

Lost or secret wills have played their role in human history. It shouldn't be a surprise, then, that wills would appear in the history of telepathic coincidences. One of the most well documented cases of apparently psychic dreaming, by the way, involved the discovery of a secret will.

In this case, when James Chaffin, a North Carolina farmer, died in 1921, his last remaining will left his entire estate to his third son, leaving his wife and other sons without any inheritance. One of these other sons began to have bizarre dreams involving his dead father. Finally, in one dream, the father said to him that he would find his true will in the pocket of his overcoat. The son went to his mother with this dream and learned that she had given her husband's overcoat to the boy's brother. He went to his brother's home, examined the overcoat and found that the lining of one pocket had been stitched together. Cutting it open, he found a note that said to look at the 27th chapter of Genesis in grandfather's bible. He went back home and enlisted his mother's help to find that bible. When they located it, the pages containing the 27th chapter of Genesis had been folded to create a pocket. In the pocket was a sheet of paper, another will, dated 14 years after the earlier one. It divided his estate equally among his sons and asked that they provide for their mother. Witnesses and a court decided that this will was truly in the father's distinctive handwriting and that this was his final will.

In a more recent example, a woman wrote me that she had a dream where she saw her grandparents handling a long scroll, a box and a set of keys. She wrote to her grandmother about this dream. Her grandmother replied that she must have dreamed of their secret will. They kept it in a safety deposit box at the local bank.

As we've seen with the Schwarz family, children also seem able to uncover secret problems between the parents. It also happens, for some unknown reason, after the children are grown. Perhaps after a safe distance of several years, a remaining, subliminal curiosity or wound prompts the discovery of an old secret. Consider these two examples:

One woman wrote me from Tulsa, Oklahoma, about a dream concerning her father and her brother. The dream occurred after the brother had died of kidney failure related to diabetes. She had always been concerned about the hostility that her father had for this brother. The brother once confided to her that he thought that perhaps he had been adopted--that was the only way he could explain his father's apparent dislike for him. Apparently feelings surrounding the mourning of her brother's death lead to her having the dream. In the dream she was at the kitchen table of her childhood home. The strange thing about the dream, however, was that she was experiencing the dream from the perspective of her father, actually seeing through his eyes. Looking about the family, the father saw his wife and his daughter as they actually were, but he looked upon the boy as small, dark and unattractive. Then the dreamer suddenly became aware of the father's thoughts: "This is not my son." The father felt anger and disappointment. When the daughter went to her father and told him this dream, he didn't believe that she had actually dreamed this, but suspected instead that her mother had betrayed their secret, that the boy's father was another man!

Another woman, from Springfield, Illinois, wrote me a letter telling a very interesting story, also involving a dream. It happened during the occasion of the fifth anniversary of her father's death. He and her mother had been married for 45 years. She had known only peace and harmony between her parents when she was growing up at home, and could not believe that her dream was true:

She, her brother and her parents are living in Springfield in either a motel or rented house. Although she and her brother were adults in the dream, and their father appeared as he did when he died at age 69, the mother looked 45 years younger, like in her high school graduation picture. She was young and pretty, but she had on a formal maid uniform, long-sleeved, black dress with white collar and cuffs. The parents were arguing about mother's returning to live in Keokuk, Iowa. He had promised her that they would "go home" shortly after moving to Springfield; and she was calling in the promise. She had made arrangements to return to Keokuk after visiting friends elsewhere, and expected, and extracted a promise from her husband to join her there by Christmas. He finally agreed to that date. The dreamer and her brother were amazed at the whole conversation. Mom had a train ticket and was prepared to leave that day. The dreamer was totally devastated at the fact that not only were the parents not planning on taking the children with them; the mother had no plans and did not invite the children to come along. The dreamer is "thinking" that she will not ever see her mother and she can't stand the pain of the thought. She begins to run from the "house," crying heartily. Her mother follows her out, tries to comfort her, and they both return inside hugging and crying. But mother has still not either changed her mind or asked the daughter to go with her. The dreamer woke up crying."

A few days after this dream, the woman took her children to visit her mother. During a moment alone with mom, she told her the dream. Her mother was quite surprised by the dream, but confirmed its details. The scene in question occurred while her mother was pregnant with her and her older brother was about six months old. Unknown to this woman, her mother had worked as a maid while she was a teenager, married to the father, whose work required them to move to a town the mother disliked. Where they were going to live, or when they would move back to Springfield, was a source of intense arguments. On this particular occasion, it may have been one of those moments when the mother considered ending the marriage or having an abortion. The abortion, of course, would have meant that our dreamer would not have been born to later have this dream.

A child's ESP, tuned to issues important for his or her own survival, may tap into parental areas the adults would consider quite private. It can go the other way, too. Most parents will attest to the fact, for example, that they seem to have feelers for when their children are getting into mischief. I received three letters involving parents using something akin to ESP to alert them to their children's misbehavior. In each case, I'm sure the youngster in question thought the parent was prying. These stories do raise the question about the possibility of invading privacy through ESP.

The first letter of this sort comes from a man who recalled a troubling situation involving his mother's detecting his use of drugs. He writes that on two separate occasions, he suddenly had the thought flash through his mind, "Mom has discovered my stash!" In each case, he dismissed the idea, sure that his secret cache of marijuana was safe from detection and that he was just being paranoid. He was wrong to dismiss his inner prompting. In both instances, his mother had indeed just then uncovered his secret. Whether she used ESP herself to do so is unknown.

One woman wrote about how ESP tipped her off to her son's secret. She had returned from an out of town trip, and went to go to bed. There were the same clean sheets she had left on the bed, for some reason she got instantly angry and had an image of her son bringing a girl into that bed. She changed the sheets, and found a long hair. When she confronted her son, he confessed to a secret liaison. Years later, she offered him and his new wife who were visiting the use of her bed. He refused. She didn't understand. He said it was because of "that incident" years ago. She had forgotten all about it, but he hadn't. He said he didn't want his mother there with them in bed.

Another mother wrote me about a time when she was cleaning house that she found herself daydreaming about her son, who was spending the day with friends. In her reverie, she saw her son and his friends in a toy store. Her son was insisting that his friend not take anything but the friend ignored the advice and pocketed some small item. Just then, the phone rang. It was her son. The police had come and arrested his friend at a toy store. He had been caught shoplifting. Her son was surprised to learn that his mom already knew what had happened. Some time later, she overheard him say to his friends, "My mom knows everything I do!"

Perhaps the parent's interest and knowledge about their children never stops. Consider this story, concerning a grown woman, a minister from Broomfield, Colorado. She was taking an adult education course on the history of women and had written for a book entitled, Women of Ideas (and What Men Have Done to Them). She enjoyed the book and exchanged one round of letters with the author. During her course, the class considered the theory that earlier generations of women had helped suppress their daughter's education, rationalizing that reading might drive them mad! She thought this theory a bit extreme, but then a puzzling event seemed to confirm its validity. Without warning, her mother appeared from out of town on her doorstep. The mother seemed almost panic stricken and marched into the house and went directly into her living room, where she kept a large bookcase. The mother immediately located the book, Women of Ideas, grabbed it from the shelf and castigated her daughter, "When I catch you reading stuff like that, I'm afraid you will lose your mind!"

The woman has no explanation for this most unusual event. Mother had apparently tuned into her daughter's "secret" book. The book was something that the mother apparently thought would do damage to the intimate bond she had with her daughter concerning certain attitudes. Her surprise raid unwittingly confirmed the book's theory of the generational suppression of women's education. This story also shows that ESP doesn't merely stumble onto secrets, but seems to ferret them out in a manner consistent with the motivations of the people involved in the relationship.

Traditional parapsychology recognizes that the personal bonds of intimacy favors the occurrence of spontaneous ESP, but has rarely attempted to probe more deeply into the subject. Perhaps they believe that the sentimentality involved clouds scientific thinking. That's why sometimes stories like the ones we've presented here are referred to as "coincidence."

Many people who have had encountered incidents like those we've described here experience them as outcomes of the connections they feel with their intimates. Sometimes their bodies react to the incidents in dramatic ways, as if encountering a shock wave. One's hair stands up on end. There's a jolting feeling in the stomach. These people know in their hearts that these experiences are not just coincidences.

What does it mean to say that something is just a coincidence? It's a way of saying there is no relationship, no intimate connection between two events. It's a way of denying the closeness that otherwise might be uncomfortable. It's similar to the way people sometimes will refer to a lover as "we're just friends"  to minimize the intimate nature of the relationship. When ESP uncovers a secret, it's understandable that someone might wish to discount the incident as "just coincidence," just as a person caught in the grips of a spouse's suspicion might protest, "you're just imagining things." It's an attempt to deny the connection, to remain free of the implied claim of the bond of intimacy.

No wonder, then, that it's hard to get people to divulge those times when secrets have been exposed through ESP. The letters I received have convinced me there's a whole book of such stories. I'm hoping that this article will prompt more people to write me about their story of ESP revealing a well-guarded secret. These stories are important more than simply for their human interest. They touch on important factors that demonstrate the connection between the human and the spiritual dimension of telepathy.

The human dimension has to do with the guilt and shame that motivate secrets and tend to isolate us from each other. The spiritual dimension has to do with God's love that created us and that continues to unite us with one another.

Remember Eden. In that lovely paradise, after Adam and Eve eat of the apple, they respond to their new consciousness by erecting two barriers. In shame they separate themselves from each other by a boundary of fig leaves. In fear and guilt they separate themselves from God. Like children who cover their eyes and proclaim to their parents, "You can't see me!" Adam and Eve believe that it's possible to separate themselves from God by hiding in the bushes. Having granted them free will, God also grants them their privacy and pretends not to see them until they emerge on their own.

Hiding in the bushes and wearing fig leaves are symbolic acts of separation and pulling away from a pre-existing oneness with the Creator and all life. These acts also transform the nature of telepathy, from a natural sense of connectedness to a magical act of mind reading.

Stories of telepathy exposing secrets, from the amusing to the awful, replay the Garden of Eden mythology. They show how we hide from one another when we choose actions that are not consistent with our ideals. They show that we are aware, at the level of the subconscious mind where we are indeed connected, that our thoughts and deeds have consequences for one another, especially for those who are bonded to us in love. That love reaches out and breaches the separation the secret created and offers a renewed opportunity for reunion.

These stories suggest that psychic development is not a matter of developing some new power through mental exercises. It is more a matter of opening up to love. In an atmosphere of love, with due respect to our ideals, we can discern the difference between our right to privacy and the false need for secrecy.

God grants us free will. Sometimes we need privacy in order to pursue our God given freedom. Privacy is of a different nature than secrecy. We need secrecy when we choose to use our free will in ways that not in the interest of harmony. Those who love us will grant us privacy yet abhor secrecy. There is no hiding from those who love us.