The Sacred Ritual Of Telepathic Reading (& Its Mortal Enemies Zuckerberg & Musk)

PRACTICAL ENLIGHTENMENT | MARCH FEATURE IV

All reading is telepathic. There's nothing like it. No movie, piece of music or work of art can move you into the mind of another human being, to see through their eyes, experience the story they want to tell, from the inside out. Reading is a sacred ritual unlike any other. 

“Look- here's a table covered with red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes…On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8…The most interesting thing here isn't even the carrot-munching rabbit in the cage, but the number on its back. Not a six, not a four, not nineteen-point-five. It's an eight. This is what we're looking at, and we all see it. I didn't tell you. You didn't ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We're not even in the same year together, let alone the same room... except we are together. We are close. We're having a meeting of the minds. We've engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy.” 

― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Somone can transcribe their innermost thoughts, feelings, ideas and dreams into an artifact that we call a book and it can be read by another, or a million others, it can travel forwards through time so that someone two hundred or two thousand years from now can experience that person’s perspective. 

I've had someone say to me just this week - “I don't really read books anymore”. It’s a sign of the downfall of the human race. Think I’m catastrophizing? I bet that person does read quite a lot—only it’s social media they’re consuming, not novels or carefully thought out and well-executed non-fiction transmissions. 

If we don't read widely offline then we are at the risk of having our consciousness shaped by the conglomorates that stand behind social media platforms and have no interest other than to turn us into mindless cash cows. 

Don't believe me? 

I was just listening to the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen being interviewed on Australian national radio.