I think it was in the mid-1970s or early ’80s when I read the story of an American housewife who was preparing lunch in the kitchen, when she suddenly felt a very sharp pain in her chest. She thought she was having a heart attack.

The next day, she received a report from the US military that her son, a soldier fighting in Vietnam, was shot in the chest at exactly the time she felt the pain.

I used to refer to such incidents as “telepathic communication” between two people, especially those closely related to each other. I didn’t know there was another term that had been invented for it—a “telesomatic” event, where “distant individuals often behave as a single body.”

In such cases, “the emotions and physical symptoms of one person are felt at a remote distance by another.”

“These phenomena,” according to Dr. Larry Dossey, “can’t be accounted for by the exchange of sensory information; the individuals are too far apart to communicate. Moreover, the physically remote persons are uninformed about the specific circumstances of each other, which makes the event difficult to explain in terms of expectation, suggestion and so on.”

Effects of prayer

Dossey is well-known for his studies on the effects of prayer on healing people, even at a distance.

According to Dossey, “Telesomatic events are spontaneous. They cannot be engineered and studied in the laboratory. They are of scientific interest for at least two reasons. First, they are exceedingly common. Second, they have an internal consistency that is simply striking.

“The most common feature of these events is the emotional closeness, empathy or love between the people involved—thus, their common occurrence between spouses, parents and children, siblings and lovers.”

I can cite another example of what may be considered a telesomatic event, related to me by a former student.

When they were newly married, the young couple moved to an apartment in a new neighborhood where they didn’t know anybody.

One day, she was left alone in the apartment while her husband went out with his friends to play billiards quite far from their new home. All of a sudden, the wife felt a very sharp pain in her stomach. The pain was such that she could hardly move. The apartment had no telephone. Mobile or cell phones had not yet been invented.

Common bond

What she did was to telepathically transmit the feeling of pain to her husband. She kept repeating the thought. “Papa, feel my pain, feel my pain. Please come back here right away!”

Her husband, who was far away, suddenly felt pain in his stomach and stopped playing. He thought of his wife and went home immediately to find her writhing in pain on the floor. He immediately brought her to the hospital.

Telepathy is the most common psychic faculty possessed and easily manifested by almost everybody. It is so common, yet we don’t easily recognize it.

For example, your telephone rings and you say aloud, “That must be Uncle Joe calling.” But your Uncle Joe has not called you in years, so you could not have been anticipating his call.

This common bond or telepathic energy exchange between two or more people could explain how distant healing could take place. Our thoughts can influence our body or even material objects. This is now being proven by quantum physics or quantum mechanics.

Perhaps, in the near future, the new science can explain other psychic or paranormal phenomena by studying the nature and behavior of the smallest particles of matter, which quantum physicists have been doing for over a hundred years now. Quantum physics is the new science of the impossible.

The next Soulmates, Karma and Reincarnation Seminar will be held June 22, 1-7 p.m., in Makati. E-mail [email protected]; tel. 8107245, 0998-9886292