Saturday, July 29, 2006

Love and Telepathy

I have recently started a new project on the theme Love and Telepathy.

The project is inspired by the book Mental Radio by Upton Sinclair who chronicled how his wife could reproduce sketches he had made while they were several miles away. Another artistic inspiration for this project are the Griffin and Sabine series by Nick Bantock, a series which contains correspondences and artworks between lovers Griffin (a card designer from London) and Sabine (a girl living in a faraway island). The exchange between them is curiously mystifying and provocatively interesting.

The project seeks correspondences, artworks or any medium of exchange that involves the themes of love and telepathy. It could be love letters sent by lovers far apart, hinting a unison in thoughts and feelings, serendipitous events, stories about "connecting" with another person and other things related to the subject.

This project has been registered at www.mail-art.de

Please mail your submissions to:
H. Malinis
108 BSA Mansion, Benavidez Street,
Legaspi Village, Makati City 1229
Philippines

Friday, July 28, 2006

Experiences on Love and Telepathy

Submitted:

Back in college, I took at course in Hypnotherapy as part of my Psychology major. One of the experiments that are professor induced us to do was trance induction and focusing our mind to see something we haven't already seen. For others, they experimented on "astral travel" - travelling to a place where they have never been and later on, asking verifying statements from persons who know the place.

For me, it was naturally a different experiment that I had in mind - seeing what my online friend looked like. I have grown fond of my online friend that I have in contact with for about a year already. However, we have never exchanged pictures or anything. So I tried to focus my mind on "seeing" this person - and drew whatever image was dictated to my mind. For one, I could not believe the outcome of the spontaneous sketch, I easily dismissed it and said to myself that this is impossible. The drawing turned out to be someone with a high forehead and who had a bit of a frown, almost cold presence...homely, simply put. I probably was thinking of stereotype appearances of people, so I easily dismissed the sketch as I haven't really encountered such an appearance.

After half a year later, I was able to get photos of my online friend...and I have not really remembered that I drew him as such way before. I realized the striking, almost caricature depiction of my online friend - and one would easily recognize that indeed it is him - if shown vis-a-vis the picture.

It only happens that even if my online and friend and I have stopped communicating for about a gap of several months, after we have reconnected...there was this noticeable synchronicity between us. We could almost tell what we were thinking and sometimes what i am typing is also what he was thinking, it is only a matter who was able to send the IM or Instant Message (MSN/Yahoo) for a fraction of a second difference. Moreso, when we reveal our imagined thoughts about each other, we almost always depict the same scenes/scenarios (apart from the stereotypical scenes) that play out generally in people's consciousness.

Meanwhile, we never have any planned meetings online but somehow, when I feel that I want to talk to him, he is online as well. My thoughts on this series of events is that it is a mixture of telepathy and serendipity caused by some deep mutual feelings between the two of us.

It is hard to relay the whole history of our relationship and my personal history prior to these occurences. I sometimes dismiss is it as pure coincidence but on times like this, I would like to indulge myself and put my biases aside and simply explore it on a phenomenological basis.

COPYRIGHT 2006. Excerpt from the article Love and Telepathy.