Animal Telepathy & Consciousness

Hi everyone, this is Ky Dickens and you're listening to The Telepathy Tapes podcast. In season one, nonspeakers showed us that telepathy is possible shattering our assumptions about the world itself. This season, we're turning to others who've also been dismissed, doubted, or mocked for the ways they claim to know, see, heal, or create. What if only by listening to those who've been ignored, we could unlock the deepest mysteries of who we are, where we come from and where we're going? This is The Telepathy Tapes, and we're opening up the next channel.

The savants we met last episode were deeply engaged with a talent, an interest, or a skill that they couldn't fully explain yet, it was often so palpable that they could literally taste it or see it. Today we turn to engaging with something much more subtle: animal communication.  Throughout season one, and in some of our Talk Tracks, we've touched on animal telepathy, but today we're pulling the pieces into one place, gathering these insights to see if they reveal something deeper about the nature of consciousness and just how far it reaches.

For much of history, scientists have asserted that consciousness belongs only to human beings. Even 100 years ago, it would've sounded preposterous to suggest that animals like horses or dogs were conscious beings. But science and mainstream views change, and animal consciousness is now being studied and widely recognized as real.

And if we're able to accept that animals may be conscious,

we have to take seriously the possibility that they can communicate. Many of the nonspeakers you met last season who experienced telepathy as a way to connect in the absence of spoken language have said that communicating with animals is not only possible, but something they do.

And one of them is Trevor, who we briefly introduced to you in the Talk Tracks.

Trevor has always loved music. We sing every night together. I'd hardly hear him say a word all day long, but then every night we sing about five songs.

This is Laura. Her son Trevor, is nonverbal and autistic, and she realized that her son was telepathic after listening to season one of The Telepathy Tapes.

And it was through music that so much got unlocked for Trevor. But on today's episode, we're focusing on Trevor again for a related but different reason. We live in Reno, Nevada area, and Trevor always liked horses when he was little we'd bring him on pony rides and he'd just be really happy and have this big smile on his face.

And then once he graduated from high school, I wanted to have him do some activities and they have an adaptive riding program here and, and this was right around the time he was becoming an open speller and he rode a few horses and he met this horse named Blackjack and he ended up riding Blackjack and he was his favorite horse.

And since the day he started riding Blackjack, he spelled the most beautiful things to me that he and Blackjack talked about during their session. So they're doing a lesson, so from the outside it looks like they're just learning how to ride and say "Whoa", and ride up and do games and stuff. But there was a whole other world going on within them.

Like what?

The two main things that blew me away that he spelled were things that nobody told Trevor. One was that on two separate occasions, two horses died, and Trevor spelled Blackjack was sad today because Buck died. And nobody told him. The same thing happened with another horse, Sully. This I found out after the fact, but we went to visit the horses and he can talk to him telepathically even when he is not riding them.

And Blackjack didn't turn around and come over by us. He just stood with his back to us and I said, what was going on with Blackjack today? And he spelled, Blackjack was mourning because Sully died and Sully was right next to Blackjack in the stalls. Then I texted my lady that runs the place and she said, yeah, Sully did die.

So I was like, okay, this is totally happening. Another story was, um, the lady that was running the program at the time told my mom and I and the other mother that was there, that she was going to have to step down because she was pregnant with triplets and Trevor was off riding. He was nowhere in earshot of hearing that discussion.

And afterward I spelled with him and I said, what did you and Blackjack talk about today? And he spelled, we talked about Nikki being pregnant with triplets. I go, how did you know that? Did you overhear us talking? And he said, no, Blackjack told me.

Laura has countless stories about Trevor knowing things that he couldn't possibly have known through ordinary ways of knowing.

But perhaps one of the most beautiful stories that Laura and Trevor share about Blackjack is when he got older and started to get sick. He couldn't ride Blackjack for almost a year because he was getting older and he couldn't carry a rider over a hundred pounds. And, but he always talked to him telepathically and he spelled to me that he could even talk to him when he wasn't there.

Like from our house, he could talk to him telepathically from anywhere that they had that connection, and they always still talk to each other even though he wasn't riding him. Well, Blackjack got cancer and had to be put down on Valentine's Day this past year. And I got a call from somebody 'cause they knew how close Trevor and Blackjack were, and they wanted us to be able to come and say goodbye to him.

And I was crying, my mom was crying. We just loved this connection between the two of them and I, it broke my heart to think, oh my God, I gotta tell him this. So he was sitting down in the car and I said, Trevor, I have to tell you something. We're going to see Blackjack because he's gotta get put down, because he has cancer. And he got the biggest smile on his face and started laughing. And I'm like, why is he happy? So we went to see Blackjack. So wait, did you find out why he was so happy that night? I spelled with him and I said, I told you today that Blackjack had to be put down 'cause he has cancer.

Did you already know that? And he spelled, yes, Blackjack told me. And I said, how do you feel about that? And he said, I'm okay because he's going home to heaven and I can ride him every day on the hill. Then he passed on Valentine's Day. I asked Trevor the next day about Blackjack passing, and he said he's on the other side with the herd, the other two horses that passed, and that he is able to ride him on the other side.

And this is the heart of today's episode. The kind of telepathy we've been exploring between people might not be confined to human minds. Many who can connect with other human beings non-locally or via telepathy, say they can communicate this way with animals too. And for reasons that I don't fully understand, horses are often the gateway to a lot of this inner species activity.

I'm Alex Anderson. I am the founder of Pet Talk Communications, and I'm a full-time animal communicator intuitive, and I also teach people how to learn how to connect with their intuition and really kind of get into the world of animal communication from scratch. Okay. So your ability to communicate with animals via what I would call telepathy,

is it something you were born with or did something happen?

I had actually had an incident with my horse that really kind of rocked my world and we had just put out a really huge bale of hay in their pasture, and it was one of the kinds that they're like 800 pounds. They're pretty large, and he took a bite out of the corner of it. I walked away. I was like, cool, you snack. We're gonna come put a net over this in just a minute. And a few minutes later he came up to the fence at me and he looked really lethargic and he had snot coming out of his nose and he just, he was not okay. And I had no idea what was going on.

I was looking him up and down. I was like, oh my gosh, is he colicking? But I've never seen this even though I've had horses since I was a child. And all of a sudden, in my mind, I heard. "I can't breathe" really loud. And yeah, it shook me a bit. And so I was like, "what do you mean? What do you mean?" So I looked it up 'cause I'd never seen a horse choke before, and it definitely did not look how you would think it would look.

And called the vet right away, explained the symptoms to him. He said, yes, definitely sounds to me like he's choking. Don't panic. Oftentimes they will resolve this on their own, but if you wanna be safe, than sorry, bring him in. And we did, 'cause I'm a safe and sorry kind of gal and uh, sure enough, he did have a pretty good blockage in there and they had to tube him

to clear it out. And that was my first experience, one-on-one with an animal that I was like, okay, something's here. And I didn't talk to anybody about it for a little while because it kind of freaked me out. And I was like, people are gonna think I'm crazy like that. This just happened. And so I sort of put it to bed and didn't touch it again for a little while.

But I did have a little twinge in my mind like. Okay. That sort of happened accidentally, but what if we can learn to do this on purpose with purpose? Okay, so then what happened next? I became really obsessed with the brain and so I went into neurolinguistics and hypnotherapy and became certified and, and all of those.

Okay. And did your research and studies help you believe that telepathy with animals was possible? We've got a really, really active conscious mind. Right. Uh, animals don't. So that is the flip side to this. This is the most natural form of communication for them. They have been born with it. Nobody's ever told them it's not possible.

There's no programming going against them and their ability to do this. They do this with each other all the time.  For some the ideas that animals can communicate, telepathically stops being theory the moment it happens to them like it did for Danish National Team Rider, Amalie König. My name is Amalie König.

I'm a Danish field jumping rider. I'm competing with the National Field Jumping Team, and right now I'm most known for my horse, Justina, and we have together won the Nordic Championships for teams two times now. I had this pony has won everything he could win, and I was totally in love with this horse, but couldn't figure out why it couldn't jump

these water jumps with me. Every time I would ride up to this jump, I could feel him tense up, but couldn't decide. Okay, what did he look at? I nearly gave up on this relationship with the horse. I think I was 11 or 12. My mom came to me and said, Hey, I've found this woman on Facebook, she says he can speak to horses.

And I was like, okay, you tell an 11-year-old that somebody can talk to her horse. I was very skeptical in the beginning. The woman they found was Ditte Young. My name is, uh, Ditte Young. I'm located in Copenhagen, Denmark. I've been working as an animal communicator for the last 27 years. Ditte has worked with a truly incredible range of Olympians, national team writers and even princesses.

I'm helping everything from royal families to national team writers, from military dressage show jumping in Brazil, the UK, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany. So when Amalie's family got in touch, Ditte was ready to prove that any skepticism was unwarranted.

Amalie had a lot of trainers and a lot of sports and mental coaches, and her mom have heard of me and this alternative way of working around the ponies because you, you ride on a pony till the age of 16 and then you swap to horses in the, in the equine  industry. Amalie had this huge problem that one of our ponies, like it wouldn't

jump, the bigger jumps with me. So Ditte connected with the pony and found out that he was trying to protect Amalie because he felt that she was inflammatory in her entire body, especially in her knees. And that's where you have contact. And I remember inflammatory, and I remember I told her, I think you should go check this out with the doctor.

And then she came back with arthritis, which is totally unexpected because she was a child, right? I mean, very young. Yeah. There's something called children arthritis. This is so fascinating, so your horse could feel your arthritis basically before you could even?

Yeah. In the beginning, we didn't know it was arthritis.

My horse was telling me that I had warm knees. I couldn't feel it myself that I was hurting, but my horse could feel it for me. So originally when you called Inta, you thought something was wrong with the horse, like something was scaring him. But it turns out he wasn't afraid to go over jumps or something wasn't wrong with him,

he was afraid it would hurt you. He wouldn't jump because he thought, uh, it would hurt me and not him. And, and Ditte how did the horse convey to you that he was worried about her knees? Like was it through images or, it was a language and an emotion where I felt comfort for her and, and the need for, I just wanna protect you, Amalie.

So I just translated that your pony, you know, wants to protect you. My horse told me that he wasn't comfortable doing big jumps with me anymore because he thought it would hurt me. The family began trying various medications for Amalie, and as wild as this sounds, the horse would convey to Ditte, the animal communicator, if the medication was working even before the doctors would know.

I do remember that the horse told me it that's not it. That's not the medicine yet. Uh, keep testing it. I'm not her psychiatrist, I'm not the doctor. I just told her go seek the doctor and ask if this makes sense. And eventually we found the right medicine and she'll always suffer from arthritis. But I do know that they got the right medicine and the medicine clearly helped because Amalie is still riding for the Danish national team and will hopefully qualify for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles when you worked,

at that high level, you sense each other, you feel one another. You send images to the horse and it performs, or it does whatever you need it to do. You need to be totally simultaneously with the horse, and that's telepathy.

Telepathy in the animal kingdom is something that Cambridge biologist, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake began studying years ago. His book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, is one of the most widely known and discussed works, exploring animal telepathy and connection. Most scientists just assume that it's a matter of routine or a matter of hearing familiar car engines or familiar smells of cars or people, and those are reasonable hypotheses, but they need testing. Um, and I've done tests on this phenomenon where I have people come home at random times. They don't know in advance. We tell them by cell phone when to come home, just when they're about to come. We don't give them advance warning and to avoid many a car sounds they travel by taxi or other unfamiliar vehicles.

And the people at home don't know when they're coming, so there's no way the dog can know from the people at home or from a routine or from the smell or sound of the car. And moreover, when we do these experiments, the dogs respond when we tell people to come home, when their intention is set to go home before they've even got into the taxi, the dog starts waiting for them at the window, and we film

the dog the whole time  the person is out, so we have a continuous record. Here's Pam, a subject from the experiment. She's watching the videos taken of her dog miles away as she was being alerted to turn her attention toward home. The videos that were taken of her and her dog were timestamped. And at this very second, me being told that Pam we're going home

JT gets up and walks across and takes a position up by the window where he waits for me. We did a a hundred videotaped experiments with JT.  On 85 out of a hundred occasions, the dog went on film and waited for the owner, the statistical significance was immense. It was, it was highly significant. And we've shown this with other dogs as well, and I think the evidence points to it being a telepathic influence.

Picking up their owner's intention to come home long before they actually arrive. But then if they have an accident or a flat tire or they meet someone who suggests they go for a drink in a bar or something and they stop coming in, their dog just drifts away from the window and loses interest.

And it fits very well with what millions of people have observed with their animals. His book prompted others to share their stories with him. When my book Dogs that know when there is coming home was published, I received lots of letters from people about their animals. One of them came from a young woman in New York called Aimee Morgana who told me that her parrot N'kisi, an African gray picked up her thoughts and even picked up her thoughts when she was dreaming and slept in her bedroom and woke her up by commenting on her dreams noisily.

So I was very intrigued to meet this parrot. And so the next time I went to New York City, I visited her and, I found that the, what she said was true. This parrot not only had an incredible vocabulary and was astonishingly articulate, probably the biggest vocabulary of any parrot ever, but I immediately did a test with her.

I said, can we do a test? We are going to a separate room from the parrot. I said, have you got any cards or pictures? And she had a, a tarot pack. And so I got out the tarot pack and I found a picture, which  showed a girl on the card. So I got the pack, and silently I look at the card without saying anything.

And from the next room, uh, within a few seconds, the parrot said, it's a girl. I was absolutely blown away by this 'cause there's no way she could have rehearsed this or I picked a card, there was no sound about the girl. And this is just what Aimee said was happening. The parrot would pick up what was in her mind when she was reading magazines at the opposite side of the room, looking at a picture of a purple car, for example.

The parrot said It's a purple car. You know it it had a amazing vocabulary and it actually understood the meaning of words, and that's the most amazing thing in itself. Aimee and I then did a whole systematic test of the parrot's abilities, which showed that it really was picking up images in her mind, telepathically to an extraordinary degree.

Dr. Sheldrake's research resonated with thousands of people around the world who experienced similar phenomenon with their own animals, and for others his work helped to validate their way of knowing. When I hepped upon this about 25 years ago, it was a complete surprise to my logical left brain. I was living and working in Silicon Valley at the time, fully into the the mental IT world, and I was finding ways to satisfy my love for nature and animals through volunteering.

This is Anna Breytenbach, one of the world's most well-known inner species communicators, and someone who's made listing across species a daily practice. When I started doing my tracking training with the Wilderness Awareness School based out of Washington State, I started to have experiences I  couldn't explain.

Tracking teaches you to notice faint clues like a paw print in the mud or a bent blade of grass, signs of where an animal has moved or rested or hunted. But Anna was picking up something deeper information that couldn't be explained by sight alone.  Because I grew up in my Native South Africa and I didn't have a clue what the North American animals were, much less what their feet or their footprints would look like.

And I began getting spontaneous information that would later prove to be true in ways that my mind had no involvement with. It was not a rational thought full process or anything at all. So I thought one of two things is happening. Either I'm just going completely crazy and hallucinating, or there's something to this I need to investigate.

I did the latter. I came across the work of Rupert Sheldrake and the entire field of quantum physics and new physics. And in the US there are hundreds of teachers of animal communication. I carefully chose to embark on studies through the Assisi International Animal Institute because of their three-pronged approach, which was looking very deeply into the physics of it, but also engendering and living from that place of the more Buddhist principles of compassion and reverence for for all life.

The third angle in our research was all around the original peoples and how natural this was for them in the ways they used to live and move with their more than human kin, you know, on the earth. Although it does actually literally apply to all species, not just the, the more than human animals, but we humans come to the party mostly by connecting with other animals and, and relearning and remembering these skills that are actually our intuition.

It's actually part of the Blueprint of our brain and how we are designed. So being that animals don't use, you know, words or language to identify things the way we do, how does animal telepathy work? What does the communication feel like or sound like? So one way to understand telepathy would be to call it just that a thought transference, where we have the idea of a sender and a receiver.

Perhaps a question and answer based process, but truth be told, that's a bit mechanical because what's really happening, even though our minds might need that sort of model to step into it and to bring our minds to the party, what's really happening is just a direct knowing in a much more than verbal way, even internally or much more than a mental imagery way.

So like old telepathy experiments and telepathy tests were to, you know, playing cards face down to tell what kind of card it was and remote viewing and all of these things. Of course, they are real, but when we are dealing with another real live being, when it's that animal or that horse with a sore legs that we are connecting with,

we are not just sort of some impartial observer who is discerning what is. There's a real heart-based and care-based connection with that being, and they know that you are open to them and in a kind of a silent dialogue with them. So over the years I've come to understand this list as a sender and a receiver and a process of information getting and

more of just a simple merging with and becoming one with the truth of that other being. When Anna first mentioned this, I was deeply moved because nonspeakers, their parents and teachers have told me over and over that what's happening is actually not simple telepathy. It's a merging of consciousness and it's daily.

It's not a one of thing just to capture in a test. It embodies their entire life. And then our mind has to interrogate aspects of that truth, like their physical health, for example. So if I'm silently in my mind asking where on your body are you experiencing discomfort? I will know that on my body as a mapping of the horse's body.

So as a horse with a sore front left leg, my left arm will become sore in this sort of corresponding place and to a lesser degree. So there's many ways that I perceive the information, but it's not because the horse has decided to send a mental image or a physical sensation or the words. Which is why this is all totally beyond

and before and outside of words or language. Early in your journey, were you doubted what you were experiencing or were you always certain? I remember that early in my journey, I'd often doubt what was coming through and the process for that matter. I was raised in a very ordinary suburban upbringing.

Nothing special, no wild camping trips or anything fantastic like that. And with my left brain logical side, I was always questioning what I was receiving. I'm so grateful that the protocol of the institute was to do case studies that were double blind case studies. We had to communicate with animals we didn't know who lived with people we'd never met before, and had to ask a series of questions and write up and transcribe both sides of the conversation, so to speak.

And then the animals person and the institute would vet all of that for accuracy or not, and how we were doing. And I must say the doubting mind has amazing ways to try to explain away information that didn't originate from that, from my own mind, you know, just really does um, I would make myself believe that if I was seeing

a green tennis ball, it might be because, you know, my favorite color is green, or I'd forgotten to make that tennis appointment. You know, instead it just really is, you know, the dog, the dog's favorite toy. But there was one moment that just really made me finally intend to drop that skepticism. I was communicating with a dog

who I'd never met, who lived farther, far away outside Sacramento. And one of the standard questions we asked all these cats and dogs was, you know, is there anything missing from your life? Obviously trying to be helpful and give them whatever they might want. Usual answers for, you know, more walks or different kind of food.

So that's the other problem in this matter of skepticism, is we have some possible imagined answers already there, and we have to, on the sort of internal level within myself, I have to listen more deeply to the more subtle, soft voice that the intuition is bringing instead of the loud data of possible answers that my mind already has.

Anyway, I ask this dog, is there anything missing from your life? Immediately I got a very brief mental flash of a bald eagle flying through the sky and in the upper part of a man's arm, and I sort of shook my head, rub my eyes, and asked again, nothing, just deafening silence. So embarrassed, I wrote it down.

I didn't want to write it down and get a pro rating from my mentors for such rubbish, but I wrote it down and gave feedback to the lady who burst into tears. Apparently her young husband had died a year before in a car crash, and he had a tattoo of a bald eagle's head on his bicep, and that was the dog showing me that, of course, who he was missing was the other man in his life by those unique identifiers.

And after that I thought, goodness me, okay, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna trust and I don't always get it right. It's a matter of fine tuning and practice, and if I don't understand it, that doesn't matter. A lot of this work, quite frankly, is work on self and continue to get my ego out of the way, my desire to know.

My attachment to the outcome, my hoped for answers, which is why it's often the most difficult to connect with our own animals because we have such a vested interest emotionally in what their answers are. No matter what your home language is, as a human, you can connect with any being, no matter how large or small, and have a fully conscious exchange.

Sometimes I find it very refreshing when the animals ask me some questions also, or give retorts to things that I'm saying, and that's when I know it really is a live communication. There are two parties in it. Perhaps one could just say essence to essence, and in that moment you are deeply related and you are knowing each other.

This is not just doing a psychic reading or remote viewing. And I wonder when you've had animals ask you questions, what are the type of things they inquire about? There's kind of the good, bad or the ugly, you know, on the emotional continuum, let's say. So sometimes I get asked questions that are quite humorous and sometimes, a lot of the time, given the nature of my work, I'm asked questions to which there is no positive answer.

Like, you know, can, can you help us? Can you open up the enclosure and let us run free? Can you stop my children being hunted and slaughtered for sports? 'cause they know that I can deeply hear them with empathy and they want to know from, for can things change in whatever their setup is. Will the, will the, uh, ecotourism business where the animals are, will they prioritize the animal's welfare?

In their management decisions. So they're often asking for things for some help, for some situation or input or healthier food or medical treatment even that just is not going to come, and I've gotta then go back to them and say, I'm sorry, this is not going to happen. Another more uplifting example would be with the animals being non-human.

They have no reason to understand how we humans think and behave like we do. Sometimes the questions I get from animals make me laugh out loud because they point to some of our strange human habits that we take for granted or think are just fine. And to them it's completely mystifying. I can think of one example right now where I was consulting to a guest establishment out in the countryside who grew their own vegetables, fully caged in a vegetable garden that was safe, apparently impervious to

other animals who would want some of the veggies, but very strong baboons, which is like a big, you know, sort of hairy primate species. They would come and love to play on the fence like a trampoline. And sometimes after rainy weather, maybe they could pry their fence open and get into the vegetables and they would take what they wanted and then leave.

So clearly I was asked to address this behavior of the baboons and asked them to stop, and I explained that the humans needed that food for themselves, for the staff, and for when guests came. And the message back from the lil' baboon was like, Nope, that's not true. And I was like, well, but I, I, it is true. He says, Nope, no, you don't need it.

So I asked her, why, why do you feel humans don't need the food? And he said, I watch. He says, we watch you guys humans come in when they're not hungry. They walk through the vegetable gardens picking the best, the most ripe and ready fruit, and then they don't even eat it. They take it away and then they do something odd with it.

They either like leave it sitting around inside the walls of a building until it becomes beyond ripe and becomes rotten and no good for any creature to each human or otherwise. Or they do very strange things like change the food, put it in other weird things, and then actually change it and kill it.

Like why do you do that? Why do you do that? And I realized that he was talking about cooking, the cooking process. And it was so funny. It was so funny to experience their perspective of, of human cooking, but also to be fair, to get that reality check and that reflection of the waste aspect where some food was going to waste.

Last season you were introduced to Lawrence Anthony, a renowned South African conservationist and author, internationally known for his fearless work, protecting elephants in some of the most dangerous parts of the world. I'm reminded now of a conversation I had with Lawrence Anthony, the elephant whisperer.

What a dear man and what a dear woman, Francoise, his wife. They invited me to his game reserve, to Zululand, when I was in the area. So I went there for a couple of days and over dinner one night he was asking me more about how this works, and I spoke about having had to address an issue with some animals a previous day.

And he said, wait a minute, what do you mean? Did you go and start the conversation? I was like, well, yeah, that's what I was there to do. He said, no way. He says, I've had all these, you know, telepathic conversations with where the animal has initiated, the elephants that had something they want me to know, or I finally sort of come to the party or I can sense them and I care about them, and I notice the subtle signs.

He says, do you mean that I could actually start a conversation? I said, yes. He was so gleeful that with that idea. Um, they had recently acquired from the chief of neighboring land, they'd acquired access to a huge tract of additional land bordering on their reserve. The fences had come down, he had rehabilitated,

an old, old reservoir to become a beautiful waterhole. And this was in a time of drought where water was scarce and was the elephant's wellbeing and potential joy in mind, he had rehabilitated this area, and for the preceding two months, the elephants had not gone near there. They hadn't stepped even a little toe onto the land at all, and he was completely mystified by that.

So the next day he dashed off to go tell the elephants, you know, this is, this is for you. And their response was, we are really, really scared. We're scared of being hunted there. And it turns out that land was where a lot of illegal hunting and poaching had been happening. So together we gave the elephants the reassurance that this was now an extension of the reserve in which they were safe and guarded and well taken care of, and that he was their protector and he would make sure that wouldn't happen to them there.

He encouraged them to go sent them mental images and within a few days they were all splashing and bathing in that beautiful waterhole that he'd been able to guide them to telepathically. Gosh, it's beautiful. And I know we have some listeners who've not listened to season one. So I think it's important to share the story of what happened to Lawrence Anthony when he died.

It's one of the most remarkable stories that I've ever heard, and it actually came to me by way of my dad, who's one of the most informed, well-read people that I know. He's brilliant and logical, but usually dismisses anything that doesn't fit into a materialist paradigm. But this story changed him and cracked him open in some way.

And here's the first phone conversation I ever had with him about this. I've always been a materialist. I haven't had much faith and religion or belief in things you can't see. I've always thought this kind of stuff is goofy. Things I read about that don't make a lot of sense. You can explain it as mistakes or coincidences or maybe people are just confused, but not an explanation that there's something out there.

But this is the story that's changed that for him. What I'm thinking about right now is a story about a man named Lawrence Anthony, who was living in South Africa with his wife, and at some point they decided to buy a game refuge, and they did. So later on, Anthony found out about a group of nine elephants that were going to be killed because they were terrorizing a populated area.

They couldn't chase 'em away, so the only solution was to kill them. When he found out about that, he went into the bush to live with those elephants and to gain their trust and they, he was almost trampled at some point, but after a while, they trusted him and over time, he was able to move them to his game preserve.

So years after Lawrence Anthony successfully moved these elephants to the reserve and was living farther away. He died of a heart attack and two days after he died, there was a commotion outside and a herd of 21 elephants, all the elephants of the game deserve, walked two days to get to his house.

They're making distress noises. They walk around the house, make the commotion 12 hours. And then they go back home to where they live in the bush. And here's a clip from a news story about this. Upon the passing of Lawrence, these majestic beasts walked 12 hours from Zululand Bush to their friend's home to pay their respects.

They stood vigil for two days outside of Lawrence's house before returning to their regular lives in the bush. They had not visited the house for a year and a half. What's even more amazing is that no one told both herds about Lawrence's death. It's like they just knew about it. It leaves with a question, how on earth did the elephants two days away know that he died?

His wife said, there's some things that cannot be explained by reason, can't be seen, that connect all living things, human and animals, and it wasn't until that night two days after he died that his wife truly understood. It's an amazing story, but even more amazing because every March 4th, the anniversary of his death, for at least three or four years afterwards, the herd would show up at his house.

He couldn't finish his sentence because he started to cry. But the beautiful end to the story is that for three consecutive years on the anniversary of Lawrence's death, the herd returned to gather at his house to pay respects. Nobody knows how they can remember the date of his death and how they could return every year on that same date, let alone how the elephants knew he died in the first place.

So there seems to be some very deep connection between people, animals, maybe everything. There's just no rational explanation about how elephants that know somebody died and walked two days they could to his house. It's inexplicable, but the power of this story amazes me every time I think about it or talk about it, it's a beautiful story.

Watching a lifelong skeptic move to tears reminded me that these stories don't just belong to those who believe they belong to anyone willing to feel. What Anna Breytenbach describes is in some mystical one-way channel. It seems to be a shared field. Something animals seem to navigate effortlessly, even as most of us have forgotten how.

This form of connecting and being in in that sort of communication space with an animal is a two-way thing. They are sensing us as well, and they're always reading a person's energy field. They know the difference between a different people on a safari vehicle. They know the difference in the mood on any given day of the handlers at the animal sanctuary.

They understand energy in its pure raw form, and they have such compassion for how we humans collectively have lost our way. They really have, and it's often at the, at their expense of course, and great tragedies on the micro scale and the macro scale and the burning down of the forest and the homelessness.

And yet they, they feel for us, it's because it's all because we've lost our way and the separation sickness we are suffering from watching my dad's skeptical materialist worldview crack open after a single encounter with animal telepathy. I wanted to know if Anna ever turned a skeptic. In the area where I lived

there was a vet clinic quite far away and where I took my cats and both the vets who were co-owners of the practice were not at all interested in me arriving and saying my cat feels this and that. They were just rolling their eyes and you could see their thought bubble, didn't need to be telepathic to see their thought bubble.

It's just, oh, shut up. You're not the expert, you know? Nonetheless would play out to be true. And the cat did have this or that, or the, the lump in the belly or whatever, and of course it was just, you know, put down to guesswork. But one of those vets who was the biggest skeptic, um, very, um, fundamental, fundamentally religious, and there was no place in her worldview for this, which she acknowledged.

And she set me up, uh, and let me know it was a set up. She said, come run to my house and talk to my dogs, and then we'll see about this, you know. So I did, I wasn't, I wasn't chuffed at the vibe of the whole thing, but I did go around and interviewed her Golden Shepherd and her beautiful retriever and they said whatever they said about, you know, their lives that I knew nothing about.

But, you know, being dogs who had a caring vet as their person, there wasn't much leading or lacking in their life. So therefore, things they were saying, you know, could have been. You know, obvious all worked out. They were fairly sort of ordinary and they just were just too happy to have anything material to say.

Then she said, oh, by the way, there's a cat locked in my laundry room. Uh, it was surrendered to my practice, and the people just never, you know, never ever came back and I wasn't able to find her home. So she's just locked up there now, basically. And, and would you talk with her as well? I'm like, okay. I said, what's her name?

No, hasn't got a name for now. I'm just saying Meow. But I'm not gonna give her a name, you know? And so we went through to the laundry and she locked me in the laundry with the cat who was traumatized uh, yeah. Clearly feeling unwanted, um, in distress that having dogs nearby didn't know what was going on.

And there was no, there was no plan for her as such. Um, but she did say she would like, um, she would like a name that would help her feel like she belonged. Mm-hmm. So I said, well, do you have. Do you have any ideas what name you'd like knowing full well that animals often don't identify with name, but she'd asked for one.

I said, well, any idea what names you? Like? She said, she said, yes, I'd like to be called Minky or Leah. So I wrote those down and shrugged and went back and gave feedback to her vet person who almost fainted because apparently this vet's best friend from childhoods, her name was Minky and she had a daughter named Leah.

So somehow this cat had known that those were the people that mattered the most to the vet and she was asking for the same name because she wanted to be that close to her. So my vet friend, she became a friend, she dropped her skepticism and became a friend. She kept the cat. And from time to time she'd refer very difficult, um, cases to me and she would tell their people, look, I'm gonna call in an animal communicator,

i'm just letting you know, I don't say I believe in how it works. I don't know how it works. I don't wanna know, but it works. Um, so I really laud her courage for following the proof and following the heart of the matter, even though her mind could never really resolve how it works. And honestly, I don't know if anyone can truly resolve how any of this works, but Dr.

Sheldrake has a theory about why these abilities may have developed in the first place. I think psychic phenomena, a part of the ways our minds are linked to each other within our social group and to the world around us, um, and to coming events that might affect us, these are things that occur in animals.

There's nothing special about humans in telepathy or premonition. Dogs are more telepathic than most people. Animals are better at sensing when an earthquake or a disaster is likely to happen than most people are. So animals are actually better at these things than we are. They're probably more sensitive to being stared at.

Um, have a greater sense of scopaesthesia, the detection of being stared at, um. So I don't think these are spiritual abilities. I think their abilities of our psychic minds, the way that our minds connect us for survival reasons with the world around us now, I think the spiritual realm is more about

other dimensions or higher dimensions of consciousness, the spiritual beings, God, to take the largest possible and most inclusive spiritual being, being forms of consciousness vastly greater than our own that we can come into contact with through mystical experiences, for example. So I think the psychic phenomena about

as it were, horizontal connections to things going on in the world and other people. Telepath is usually about needs. A baby needs its mother. The mother telepathically picks up the baby's in need. This is not a spiritual thing. It's a basic ability, no different in principle from a baby crying when it's near the mother and the mother hearing it cry and respond to it.

It's just a more distant way of picking up the need. So I think that the spiritual dimension is actually rather different. And you can have people who are psychically talented, who may be very unspiritual, and you can have spiritual people who are not very psychically talented, although they often do go together.

And I think that animals of all kinds or use these abilities as humans did and still do. When we, uh, developed technologies like telegrams, telephones, and emails and so forth, we didn't need these abilities as much just as we don't need our sense of direction as much if you have a GPS navigation system.

So I think to some degree we'd lose these things as we've moved into a more modern industrial world. Perhaps the spiritual thread here is that all living things can tap into the same kind of communication no matter the language or the species.

To bring our questions full circle and close out this episode, I wanted to turn back to some nonspeakers. Many of the nonspeakers that I've met have described what it's like to telepathically communicate with animals. And one of those nonspeakers is 17-year-old Philip, who lives in Copenhagen. His mother is Ditte Young, the animal communicator

you met at the beginning of the episode. My first question for Philip was whether he experienced telepathy between animals and his mom differently. This is the digital voice that Philip chose to communicate. His answers.  Yes and no. No, because it's the same. Yes, because one is an animal and the other is my mom.

That's the difference. So Philip, does one feel different? No communication. Is communication. Does it feel different to talk to one or the other? The way I use my language remains the same. There might be a slight difference in how it feels to use my non-verbal language, depending on who I'm telepathic with.

It feels different talking to someone angry than to someone who is feeling something else emotionally. Knowing that Ditte Phillips's mom is a vetted animal communicator, I asked if she's able to help him tune in further or if it was the other way around, and he helped to open up her gifts. I've never known anything else.

My mom has always seemed to understand and hear the universe, but I helped her understand the structure of it. I helped her to understand what's inside the vortex. I've also helped her in the sense that I'm the reason she continued to develop her abilities. I'm part of why she had to step forward with them even when life was hard.

And then I asked Philip if there's something he wish others knew about nonverbal communication, and his answer was an unexpected delight.  I wish animals would introduce themselves to me before they start talking to me, so I know what they want before they contact me. I always say, "hi, I'm Philip" when I greet someone.

Often I get startled and then I wanna leave. I feel most comfortable with horses because they're usually better at keeping a distance when they talk to me. But dogs always want to come up close. I don't separate humans from animals. To me, they're just souls. I understand oneness. It's never been different for me. And I treasured how silly he thought it was when I asked how it feels for him to communicate beyond words with both animals and people.

It would make more sense to discuss how silly it is that humans don't believe we can communicate without words. We can, can't we? I've always done that. And finally,  I asked what he wished more people understood about non-speaking voices, be it human or animal. Non-verbal communication is the language of the heart.

I'd wish that people understood they could communicate without words because then we'd all speak with our hearts. That would be lovely. And what does it mean for you moving forward to live in a world where telepathy between humans and animals could be more accepted or even valued? In my world, there's already a lot of telepathy between animals and humans, just as things are.

I told Philip that we were investigating consciousness in season two and asked if he wanted to weigh in on anything else, and I wanted to highlight this next thought because it starts to lay the foundation for where we're going next. Trees in cities have a hard time communicating with each other because they can't hear each other through all the noise.

As a result, the plants stopped communicating and subsequently they stopped filtering the air. When they speak, they also cleanse each other. It's the same between animals and humans. When humans go to therapy, they also cleanse themselves by talking about what's bothering them. When my mom talks with animals, they feel better afterwards because she listened to them and understood them.

And here's Lily from season one, really every living organism has an energy field that produces an aura. I communicate with all sorts of animals. Plants also have auras. They also sing. We basically real time create a field of energy around us with our thoughts that extends beyond our body. And here's Houston, who you met last season.

I see energy, good and bad, lightness and darkness. I see auras around people, animals, and energy coming from living things that doesn't really begin to describe it. I hear everything. I hear the languages of trees and animals. I hear everyone's thoughts, and Anna Breytenbach also points out that this communication is not just limited to animals, which yes, makes you wonder what else is conscious.

The idea of consciousness that we humans have is also a bit of a construct in, in my experience, everything, and I deliberately say thing, everything is infused with this life force, with the animate or seemingly inanimate. Yeah, it's all energy. It's all energy. And the the density with which those energy sort of units are packed together are what makes something appear to be solid or or liquid or serial or just apparently invisible.

So our human idea of consciousness is more like the lens of our inquiry as we are sort of looking in at one facet of the diamond of of life. But everything is part of that, one isn't just pulsing with that. Telepathic communication, therefore doesn't stop with animals or insects or with single celled organisms.

That's why I do refer to it as interspecies communication. I've had many a conversation with plants and trees, both wild growing and in orchards with rivers, with lakes, with ecosystems. Even the micro ecosystem of a vegetable garden that somebody is planning. A permaculture friend asked me once to come help, so I just walked into the space and

and asked a general blanket question into the collective consciousness, consciousness of the many species that were there, including the minerals and the elements in the soil. And I asked, you know, what is needed? What is wishful the most abundant well life here? And I got a myriad of answers from different sort of layers in that ecosystem.

I've communicated with a cornfield where the stems of corn that were at the edges of the rows were experiencing extreme hardship because of the unnatural formation. And they were taking the full brunt of the oncoming wind or weather because their brothers and sisters were standing in a line behind them instead of a more natural organic shape that would've emerged

where they would share the load and distribute whether or other, or other issues that that come in. And so everything is consciousness in a non unit kind of a way. And we humans seem to have forgotten that as well. I think a large part of my spiritual journey has been informed by, and catalyzed by communicating with the more than human world and just sensing their, their isness, their natural divine spirit that's flowing through without impediment.

And there's absolutely no difference in the self-awareness or intelligence levels of any being. The only issue is how we humans measure intelligence and then we turn around to project that onto making meaning of how intelligence something is or isn't. But it doesn't take a mirror self-recognition test by a gorilla on elephant to prove self-awareness.

The smallest effort on the smallest flower is very self-aware, has a life that is meaningful to them and matters to them. What you've just heard about consciousness being everywhere may sound like fantasy or even fringe, but what if it's neither of those things? And just simply fundamental. Imagine that consciousness is everywhere, in animals and plants and rivers and fields and stones, and there is a quiet communicating intelligence of the living world that we once instinctively understood. What if consciousness is so ancient and so foundational that you don't even need a brain to access it? Next week we'll explore just that we're heading to Connecticut to meet a 20-year-old non-speaker named Nina, who isn't just telepathic with people, but says she can communicate with plants, which has been backed up with her unbelievable ability to diagnose ailments and recommend herbal cures with stunning accuracy.

It takes a village to make this podcast. And I wanna thank our producers, Jessie Stead, Jill Pasiecnik and Katherine Ellis. Original music is by Rachel Cantu. Mix mastering and additional music is by Michael Rubino. Our associate Producer is Solina Kennedy. Original artwork is by Ben Kendora Design. And I'm Ky Dickens, your executive producer, writer, and host.

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