Spiritual Telepathy
An Om Times Interview with Colleen Mauro
In the late 80s, Colleen Mauro launched Intuition: A Magazine for the Higher Potential of the Mind to introduce readers to the emerging field of intuition development. In her new book, Spiritual Telepathy: Ancient Techniques to Access the Wisdom of Your Soul (Quest Books, 2015), she takes us beyond the intuition basics and introduces us to a more advanced form of intuitive perception called spiritual telepathy.
Colleen’s extensive background in magazine publishing includes work a publisher, editor, advertising director and circulation and marketing consultant. Intuition, published from 1988 to 2001, explored the higher potential of the mind and the many and varied ways of intuitive knowing. The magazine, which included both research and how-to information, featured leaders in the field such as Dean Radin, Jean Houston and Candace Pert.
In Spiritual Telepathy, she introduces the advanced mind-training techniques that will allow us to access the wisdom and guidance of our own souls. These teachings, also known as the esoteric or mystery teachings, come from a body of knowledge called the Ageless Wisdom. Once taught in the ancient mystery schools of Egypt, Greece, Babylon, and India, these teachings were first put into book form by the Hindu sage Patanjali, author of The Yoga Sutras.
As the Wisdom teachings tell us, the soul is our gateway to the higher worlds. When we make contact with our souls, we have access to the universal or divine mind where information on all subjects can be found. In the past, it's been only the "special" people—our saints, shamans and spiritual leaders—who have had access to the higher worlds. Colleen’s message is that it’s possible for each of us to build our bridge to the soul and tap that universal wellspring of inspiration and knowledge.
In her book, she draws on a variety of spiritual traditions and explains how the new science validates these ancient teachings. She shares her own experiences and introduces us to others who have also used these practices.
Most of the books on this topic are written in dense and arcane language. Colleen’s goal is to make these teachings accessible to a wider audience and to provide us with a step-by-step method for building our bridge to the soul.
In an interview with OM Times magazine, Colleen describes this bridge building in detail and explains how we can become pioneers in the next stage of human development.
Om Times: Your book is titled Spiritual Telepathy. Can you define this term?
A: In the book, I describe the three types of telepathy: instinctual or feeling-based telepathy, mental or mind-to-mind telepathy and spiritual, or soul-to-soul telepathy. Spiritual telepathy can be defined as communication from the subtle worlds, from our own souls or from higher beings. Communication from the subtle levels is always telepathic. We don’t audibly hear the information; it is dropped into our brains where it is interpreted and used.
Om Times: What will readers learn by reading your book?
A: The book provides both the theory and a step-by-step mind training practice designed help readers build their bridge to the soul—and through the soul, to the higher worlds.
I have always been very touched—and envious—when reading about people who have the ability to communicate with the higher worlds. Joan of Arc, for example, talked to saints and angels, Eileen Caddy received guidance that lead to the founding of the Findhorn community in Scotland, and the botanist George Washington Carver walked in the woods each morning to talk to God. It’s always stirred a longing in me, and I’ve always wondered, is it only special people—people more evolved than I am—who can have these experiences? Is it somehow preordained? By immersing myself in this topic, I discovered that we can all cultivate this ability.
Om Times: How does this book relate to intuition, the focus of your magazine?
A: I see it as the next step, a higher form of spiritual perception. Some call it the higher correspondence to our personal intuition. Our personal intuition provides us with guidance about our work, our relationships, and other aspects of our day-to-day lives. The soul knows our higher purpose; it is our divine partner, our purest and most reliable source of direction and guidance.
Om Times: In the book, you say that we are on the brink of an evolutionary leap, one as profound as our emergence from animal to human. Can you explain?
A: When we make contact with the soul, we take our first steps into the subtle worlds and cross the boundary from human to superhuman developmen
Om Times: Why is this so important now?
A: When we make conscious contact with the soul, everything changes. We lose our sense of separateness and realize that we are part of a great universal life, the soul of humanity. We find our place within the greater whole and experience our interconnection with all life.
You can image how the world would change if a critical mass of people made this shift. Barbara Marx Hubbard has written that those of us on earth today are “the cross-over generation, responsible for leading the way from one stage of our species’ evolution to the next.” Eckhart Tolle talks about this too, but in more stark terms. He writes that as a species, we have the choice to evolve or die. They both say that evolution happens as a result of some sort of crisis that propels or forces us to make a leap forward. Tolle uses the example of an amphibian who is forced to develop the ability to live on land after its habitat dries up. Our own habitat is in trouble and we are faced with the same need now. Our world is full of conflict, and we have weapons that could easily extinguish the human race. We need to make that leap now, not onto land, but into subtle worlds.
Om Times: How do we make contact with the soul?
A: We contact the soul through the daily practice of creative meditation. Many meditation practices focus only on quieting the mind. In this type of meditation, we go a step further and actively train our minds to transmit information from the soul to the brain. The information has to reach the brain to become part of our conscious awareness.
In the same way that our homes are wired for telephone and internet connection, creative meditation allows us to create the threads and cables that will link us to the higher worlds. We create these cables by projecting our attention upward to the soul, day after day. As we do this, we anchor small threads of energy that will eventually, thread by thread, form a symbolic bridge between the mind, the brain and the soul. This bridge is called the Rainbow Bridge or the Bridge of Light in the Wisdom teachings. It is called the Antahkarana in the Hindu texts and the “strait” or “narrow” gate in the New Testament.
It’s important to note that we don’t do this work alone. When we focus our attention upward, the soul turns its attention downward. The Bridge is built through the united effort of both the soul and the human personality. In The New Testament, it is said that we take “heaven by storm.” It is our determination, our day-to-day knocking, that will eventually open the doors to the higher worlds. As we approach the soul, we increasingly come under the influence of its higher vibration, and our own vibratory rate starts to speed up. When the vibratory rate of our mind and brain matches that of the soul, it becomes possible to enter the higher worlds at will.
Our repeated contact with the higher worlds will, in the end, produce a new type of human: the soul-aligned human being. We become pioneers as we lead the way to the next stage of human development.
OM Times: Can you say more about the actual practice of creative meditation?
A: There are five stages of creative meditation: concentration, meditation, contemplation, illumination and inspiration. The first and most important steps are concentration and mind control. It is through mind control that we learn to withdraw our attention from the outer world and gradually reorient it to the subtle realms. When we do this, the mind becomes our true sixth sense—the tool we use to enter the subtle world.
Concentration practices can include basic focusing exercises or the use of mantras. With creative meditation, we use a seed thought—a word or sentence —to focus the mind. This technique allows us to increase our powers of concentration and to train our minds to think more abstractly. As we ponder the deeper meaning of each seed thought, we develop the ability to reach beyond the rational mind to gain deeper insights.
Meditation is simply prolonged concentration, the ability to hold our attention, in any direction, on a particular idea or thought. The stage of contemplation is reached when we make contact with the soul. When we hold our minds “steady in the light,” the mind can be “impressed” with the wisdom and knowledge of the soul. In the Wisdom teachings, this stage is called the “higher interlude.” Once information and ideas from the soul are impressed on the mind, this process is repeated as the mind relays the information to the brain. Illumination is achieved when the brain consciously registers information from the soul. The last stage, inspiration, occurs when we utilize this information in a creative project or service.
Om Times: You write that the first step in mind training is the refinement of our physical, emotional and mental bodies. Why is this important?
A: To create a direct line of communication between the soul, mind and brain, we need to purify the physical body and quiet our minds and emotions. Illness, fatigue and mental or emotional static will block our reception of higher wisdom and ideas.
Refinement practices are a part of all our spiritual traditions. These teachings vary from the noble eightfold path of the Buddha, to the development of the Christian virtues, to the teachings on character refinement found in Judaism and Islam. Although the methods vary from tradition to tradition, the requirements and goals are the same: purity of body, control of the emotions, and stability of mind. In the book, I have included the refinement practices that have help me the most—harmlessness, the nightly review, and meditations on lovingkindness, forgiveness and compassion.
Om Times: You write that the experience of soul contact physically alters our brains. How? Is there any scientific evidence for this claim?
A: According to the Wisdom teachings, when information from the soul flows into the brain, both the pineal and pituitary glands are activated. The downpouring energy from the soul has an effect on the physical structure of the brain, making it easier, over time, to register information from the subtle planes.
In the last ten years, neuroscientists have studied the effect of contemplative practices on the brain. Their research has confirmed that mental training can and does bring about observable changes in our brains. In How God Changes Your Brain, neuroscientist Andrew Newberg describes the neurological changes associated with higher states of consciousness: “If you contemplate God long enough, something surprising happens in the brain. Neural functioning begins to change. Different circuits become activated, while others become deactivated. New dendrites are formed, new synaptic connections are made, and the brain becomes more sensitive to subtle realms of experience.”
Rick Hanson, a neuropsychologist and the author of Buddha’s Brain, has also written about the effect of higher states on the brain. As Hanson puts it, “Mental activity leaves lasting marks on the brain—much like a spring shower leaves tracks on a hillside . . . as neurons wire together, structure builds in the brain.”
Q: You also write that the experience we call genius comes from our contact with the subtle worlds. Can you explain?
A: The wisdom teachings tell us that the soul is the portal or gateway to the higher worlds. When we make contact with the soul, we have access to the universal or divine mind, the storehouse of all wisdom and knowledge.
Higher Creativity, written by the late Willis Harman, the former president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, is one of my all-time favorite books. Harman looked at the biographies of many artists, writers, composers, scientists and inventors and discovered that their greatest achievements came from an intuitive breakthrough.
When I looked at his original sources, and read the full text of each interview, I discovered that many of the people we call geniuses talked about their creative process in exactly the way it’s explained in the Wisdom teachings—that it is through the soul that they had access to a universal flow of information and inspiration.
One of his sources was a book called Talks with Great Composers, written in the late 1880s by Arthur Abell, an American violinist living in Europe. Abell interviewed Puccini, Brahms, Strauss, Wagner, and other well-known composers about the source of their creative genius. As I read though the book, I was fascinated by the consistency of their experience. Each spoke of the soul as the portal to a universal source of inspiration. Once they were connected to this source, ideas and images simply flowed into their brains. I included many of these stories in the book. I’ve also included the experiences of writers, painters, and scientists.
The Wisdom teachings tell us that the downpouring of energy from the soul to the brain awakens new brain cells, and that creative leaps and inspired thinking can occur. I think Einstein is a great example. His equation E = mc came in a moment of inspiration when, in his words, “a storm broke loose in my mind and with it came the answers.” A friend later said that he had “tapped into God’s thoughts and tuned into the master plan for the universe.” After his death, pathologists dissected Einstein’s brain, looking for anomalies that would explain the source of his genius. He probably thought was that hilarious—the brain is simply the receiver—not the generator—of this experience. His many quotes including, “There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge. . . . All great discoveries have involved such a leap” and “The mystical . . . is the source of all true art and science”—made it clear that his inspiration came from a higher source.
As I studied this material, it become clear to me that genius is not a rare and random event but an experience each of us can cultivate. Imagine the inspired writing, the beautiful works of art and the groundbreaking inventions we will bring to the world as the soul in each of us unfolds.