S2E5: Animal Telepathy & Consciousness

Animal communication moves from theory to lived experience. A non-speaking teen, Trevor, spells intimate details from his therapy horse, knowing about deaths, emotions, and conversations no one told him. Animal communicator Alex Anderson recounts the moment her own horse “spoke” to her for the first time, a shocking experience that launched her full-time work helping people understand the inner worlds of the animals they love. Danish National Team rider Emily Koenig works with communicator Ditte Young, whose insights from a pony lead to an unexpected arthritis diagnosis that changes Emily’s path in the sport. Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake shares research suggesting animals can sense human intention, like dogs waiting at the precise moment their person decides to return home. And interspecies communicator Anna Breytenbach describes telepathy not as sending messages but as stepping into a shared field of awareness. We also hear the now famous story of elephants who walked miles to mourn conservationist Lawrence Anthony, gathering at his home and returning again on the anniversary of his passing. Across every story, a single idea emerges: connection does not require words. And if communication can move through attention, emotion, and presence, then maybe consciousness is wider, more relational, and more ancient than we assume. This episode asks us to listen beyond language, to each other, to animals, and to the living world itself. _______ Join The Telepathy Tapes Backstage Pass https://thetelepathytapes.supercast.com/ to get ad-free episodes, never-before-heard interviews, behind-the-scenes documentary footage, and access to our private Discord community. This is your invitation to come closer. To help shape what’s next. To be more than a listener… to be a co-creator of this paradigm shift. So if you’ve felt moved, if you’ve felt seen, if you’ve felt the call, subscribe today and join us: thetelepathytapes.com. https://thetelepathytapes.com/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ky Dickens?

  Hi, everyone. This is Kai Dickens and you're listening to the Consciousness Cassettes from TTT Media.

• 0:11Ky Dickens?

  In our first series, The Telepathy Tapes, non-speakers showed us that telepathy is possible, shattering our assumptions about the world itself.

• 0:20Ky Dickens?

  In this series, 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 Consciousness Cassettes, and we're opening up the next channel.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:14Ky Dickens?

  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 have 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

• 1:59Ky Dickens?

  and widely recognized as real. And if we're able to accept that animals may be conscious, then we have to take seriously the possibility that they can communicate. Many of the non-speakers 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.

• 2:23Speaker 02

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

• 2:33Ky Dickens?

  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.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  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 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 sessions. 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

• 3:31Speaker 02

  up and do games and stuff. But there was a whole other world going on within them.

• 3:36Ky Dickens?

  Like what?

• 3:37Speaker 02

  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. And 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 them telepathically even when he's 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

• 4:17Speaker 02

  did die. So I was like, okay, this is totally happening. Another story was 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.

• 4:53Ky Dickens?

  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.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  He couldn't ride Blackjack for almost a year because he was getting older and he couldn't carry a rider over 100 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 because 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 love this connection between the two of them. And I broke my heart to think, oh, my God, I got to tell him this. So he was sitting down in the car.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  And I said, Trevor, I have to tell you something. We're going to see Blackjack because he's got to 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.

• 6:04Ky Dickens?

  So wait, did you find out why he was so happy?

• 6:07Speaker 02

  That night, I spelled with him. And I said, I told you today that Blackjack had to be put down because 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 OK 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.

• 6:38Ky Dickens?

  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 interspecies activity.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  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.

• 7:12Ky Dickens?

  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?

• 7:18Speaker 03

  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 and at 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 colicating? I've never seen this, even though I've had

• 8:00Speaker 03

  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, because 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 want to be safe and sorry, bring him in. And we did, because I'm a safe and sorry kind of gal. And sure enough, he did have a pretty good blockage in there and they had to tube him to clear it out.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  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?

• 9:10Ky Dickens?

  Okay, so then what happened next?

• 9:12Speaker 03

  I became really obsessed with the brain and so I went into neurolinguistics and hypnotherapy and became certified in, in all of those.

• 9:20Ky Dickens?

  Okay, and did your research and studies help you believe that telepathy with animals was possible?

• 9:24Speaker 03

  We've got a really, really active conscious mind, right? 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.

• 9:44Ky Dickens?

  For some, the idea that animals can communicate telepathically stops being theory the moment it happens to them, like it did for Danish national team rider Emily Koenig.

• 9:53Speaker 04

  My name is Emily Koenig. I'm a Danish show jumping rider. I'm competing with the national show jumping team and right now I'm most known for my horse, Jessina, and we have together won the Nordic Championships for teams two times now. This pony has won everything he could win and I was totally in love with this horse, but couldn't figure out why it wouldn'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 found this woman on Facebook. She says he can speak to horses.

• 10:38Speaker 04

  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.

• 10:48Ky Dickens?

  The woman they found was Dieter Young.

• 10:50Speaker 05

  My name is Dieter Young. I'm located in Copenhagen, Denmark. I've been working as an animal communicator for the last 27 years.

• 11:00Ky Dickens?

  Dieter has worked with a truly incredible range of Olympians, national team riders, and even princesses.

• 11:05Speaker 05

  I'm helping everything from royal families to national team riders, from military, dressage, show jumping.

• 11:15Speaker 05

  In Brazil, the UK, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany.

• 11:22Ky Dickens?

  So when Emily's family got in touch, Dieter was ready to prove that any skepticism was unwarranted.

• 11:27Speaker 05

  Emily 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 equine industry. Emily had this huge problem that one of her ponies.

• 11:48Speaker 04

  Like it wouldn't jump the bigger jumps with me.

• 11:52Ky Dickens?

  So Dieter connected with the pony and found out that.

• 11:54Speaker 05

  He was trying to protect Emily 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.

• 12:13Ky Dickens?

  Which is totally unexpected because she was a child, right? I mean, very young.

• 12:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, there is something called children arthritis.

• 12:20Ky Dickens?

  This is so fascinating. So your horse could feel your arthritis, basically, before you could even?

• 12:25Speaker 04

  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.

• 12:36Ky Dickens?

  So originally, when you called on Dieter, 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.

• 12:45Speaker 04

  He wouldn't jump because he thought it would hurt me and not him.

• 12:50Ky Dickens?

  And Dieter, how did the horse convey to you that he was worried about her knees? Like, was it through images or?

• 12:55Speaker 05

  It was a language and an emotion where I felt comfort for her and the need for, I just want to protect you, Emily. So I just translated that your pony, you know, wants to protect you.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  My horse told me that he wasn't comfortable doing big jumps with me anymore because he thought it would hurt me.

• 13:13Ky Dickens?

  The family began trying various medications for Emily. And as wild as this sounds, the horse would convey to Dieter, the animal communicator, if the medication was working, even before the doctors would know.

• 13:23Speaker 05

  I do remember. That the horse told me 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 will always suffer from arthritis. But I do know that they got the right medicine.

• 13:45Ky Dickens?

  And the medicine clearly helped because Emily is still riding for the Danish national team and will hopefully qualify for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

• 13:53Speaker 05

  When you work at that high a 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.

• 14:14Ky Dickens?

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• 14:59Ky Dickens?

  I wear it with everything. It can be dressed up, it can be dressed down, it can be layered with other necklaces. I love it and you'll see it in a lot of our video podcasts. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was the telepathy tapes. It's the best way to support our show.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 15:58Ky Dickens?

  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 in connection.

• 16:11Speaker 06

  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. 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 cellphone when to come home, just when they're about to come. We don't give them advance warning. And to avoid familiar 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,

• 16:56Speaker 06

  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.

• 17:12Ky Dickens?

  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 time stamped.

• 17:22Speaker 07

  And at this very second, to 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.

• 17:31Speaker 06

  We did 100 videotaped experiments with JT. On 85 out of 100 occasions, the dog went on film and waited for the owner. The statistical significance was immense. It was highly significant. And we've done this with other dogs as well. And I think the evidence points to it being a telepathic influence. They're 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 home, the dog just drifts away from the window and loses interest. And it fits very well with what...

• 18:15Speaker 06

  Millions of people have observed with their animals.

• 18:18Ky Dickens?

  His book prompted others to share their stories with him.

• 18:21Speaker 06

  When my book Dogs That Know When Their Own 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 Amy Morgano, who told me that her parrot, Nkesia, an African Grey, 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 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.

• 19:05Speaker 06

  But I immediately did a test with her. I said, can we do a test? We go into a separate room from the parrot. I said, have you got any cards or pictures? And she had a tarot pack. So I got out the tarot pack. 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, within a few seconds, the parrot said, it's a girl. I was absolutely blown away by this because 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 Amy 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,

• 19:49Speaker 06

  looking at a picture of a purple car, for example, the parrot said, it's a purple car. It had an amazing vocabulary and it actually understood the meaning of words. And that's the most amazing thing in itself. Amy 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.

• 20:14Ky Dickens?

  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.

• 20:24Speaker 08

  When I hatched 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 mental IT world. And I was finding ways to satisfy my love for nature and animals through volunteering.

• 20:42Ky Dickens?

  This is Anna Breytenbach, one of the world's most well-known interspecies communicators and someone who's made listening across species a daily practice.

• 20:49Speaker 08

  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.

• 20:58Ky Dickens?

  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.

• 21:10Speaker 08

  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 or thoughtful 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,

• 21:55Speaker 08

  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 all life. And the third angle in our research was all around the original peoples and how natural this was for them and the ways they used to live and move with their more-than-human kin on the earth. Although it does actually literally apply to all species, not just the more-than-human animals. But we humans come to the party mostly by connecting with other animals 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.

• 22:38Ky Dickens?

  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?

• 22:49Speaker 08

  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, and 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're dealing with another real live being,

• 23:33Speaker 08

  when it's that animal, that horse with a sore leg that we're connecting with, we're 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 less 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.

• 24:08Ky Dickens?

  When Anna first mentioned this, I was deeply moved because non-speakers, 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-off thing just to capture in a test. It embodies their entire life.

• 24:23Speaker 08

  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 a horse, where on your body are you experiencing discomfort? I will know that on my body as a mapping of the horse's body. So if a horse was a sore front left leg, my left arm will become sore in the 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.

• 25:02Ky Dickens?

  Early in your journey, were you doubted what you were experiencing or were you always certain?

• 25:06Speaker 08

  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.

• 25:48Speaker 08

  And I must say, the doubting mind has amazing ways to try to explain away information that didn't originate from my own mind, you know, it just really does. And I would make myself believe that if I was seeing, you know, 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'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 far, 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?

• 26:31Speaker 08

  Obviously trying to be helpful and give them whatever they might want. Usual answers were, 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 intuition is bringing. Instead of the loud data of possible answers that my mind already has. Anyway, I asked 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 then the upper part of a man's arm. And I sort of shook my head, rubbed my eyes and asked again. Nothing, just deafening silence. So embarrassed, I wrote it down.

• 27:14Speaker 08

  I didn't want to write it down and get a poor 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 continuing 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

• 27:59Speaker 08

  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 isn't 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?

• 28:41Speaker 08

  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? Because they know that I can deeply hear them with empathy and they want to know from, can things change in whatever their setup is? Will the, will the ecotourism business where the animals are, will they prioritize the animals' welfare in their management decisions?

• 29:27Speaker 08

  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 got to 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. And 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

• 30:12Speaker 08

  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 behaviour of the baboons and ask 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 lead baboon was like, "Nope, that's not true."

• 30:55Speaker 08

  And I was like, "Well, it is true." He says, "Nope, no, you don't need it." So I asked, "Well, 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 eat, 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?"

• 31:40Speaker 08

  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.

• 31:58Ky Dickens?

  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.

• 32:08Speaker 08

  I'm reminded now of a conversation I had with Lawrence Anthony, the elephant whisperer. What a dear man and what a dear woman Francois's his wife. They invited me to his game reserve, Tula Tula, 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 the previous day. And he said, wait a minute. What do you mean? Did you go and start the conversation? And I was like, well, yeah. Yeah, that's what I was there to do. He said, no way. He says, I've had all these, you know, telepathic conversations where the animal has initiated, the elephants have had something they want me to know. I finally sort of come to the party or I can sense them and I care about them and I notice the subtle signs.

• 32:53Speaker 08

  He says, do you mean that I could actually start a conversation? I said, yes. He was so gleeful about that idea. And 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 water hole. And this was in a time of drought where water was scarce. And with the elephants' well-being and potential joy in mind, he'd 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,

• 33:37Speaker 08

  you know, this is, this is for you. And their response was, we're 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 send them mental images and within a few days, they were all splashing and bathing in that beautiful water hole that he'd been able to guide them to telepathically.

• 34:12Ky Dickens?

  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.

• 34:41Speaker 09

  I've always been a materialist. I haven't had much faith in 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.

• 35:01Ky Dickens?

  But this is the story that changed that for him.

• 35:03Speaker 09

  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. 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 them 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 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.

• 35:41Ky Dickens?

  So years after Lawrence Anthony successfully moved these elephants to the reserve and was living farther away, he died of a heart attack.

• 35:48Speaker 09

  And two days after he died, there was commotion outside and a herd of 21 elephants.

• 35:57Speaker 09

  All the elephants in the game reserve 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.

• 36:11Ky Dickens?

  And here's a clip from a news story about this.

• 36:13Speaker 10

  Upon the passing of Lawrence, these majestic beasts walked 12 hours from Zoolaland 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.

• 36:39Speaker 09

  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.

• 37:13Ky Dickens?

  He couldn't finish a 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.

• 37:34Speaker 09

  So there seems to be some very deep connection between people, animals, maybe everything. There's just no rational explanation about how elephants would know somebody died and walked two days to get 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.

• 38:00Ky Dickens?

  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 isn't 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.

• 38:18Speaker 08

  This form of connecting and being 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 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 their expense, of course, and great tragedies on the micro scale and the macro scale, and the burning down of the forests and the homelessness, and yet they feel for us because it's all because we've lost our way and the separation sickness we're suffering from.

• 39:02Ky Dickens?

  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.

• 39:10Speaker 08

  In the area where I lived, there was a vet clinic quite far away, 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 was just, "Oh, shut up, you're not the expert," you know. Nonetheless, it would play out to be true, and the cat did have this or that, or the other 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, very fundamentally religious, and there was no place in her worldview for this, which she acknowledged, and she set me up, and let me know it was a setup, she said, "Come on to my house and talk to my dogs,

• 39:55Speaker 08

  and then we'll see about this," you know. So I did, 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 their lives that I knew nothing about, but, you know, being dogs who had a caring vet as their person, there wasn't much needing or lacking in their life, so therefore, things they were saying, you know, could have been... Yeah, obvious sort of 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, was surrendered to my practice and the people just never, you know, never ever came back. And I wasn't able to find her a home, so she's just locked up there now, basically.

• 40:39Speaker 08

  And, and would you talk with her as well? I'm like, okay, I said, what's her name? No, it 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. He was traumatized, uh, yeah, clearly feeling unwanted. Um, in distress at 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, 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?

• 41:24Speaker 08

  She said, she said, yes, I'd like to be called Minkey 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 childhood's name was Minkey 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 cases to me and she would tell their people. Look, I'm gonna call in an animal communicator. I'm just letting you know.

• 42:08Speaker 08

  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. And 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.

• 42:22Ky Dickens?

  And honestly, I don't know if anyone can truly resolve how any of this works. But Dr. Sheldon Drake has a theory about why these abilities may have developed in the first place.

• 42:31Speaker 06

  I think psychic phenomena are part of the ways our minds are linked to each other within our social group and to the world around us 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 and have a greater sense of scopasthesia, the detection of being stared at. So I don't think these are spiritual abilities.

• 43:13Speaker 06

  I think they're 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. Spiritual beings, God, to take the largest possible, the 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 psychic phenomena about, as it were, horizontal connections to things going on in the world and other people. Telepathy is usually about needs.

• 43:54Speaker 06

  A baby needs its mother, and the mother telepathically picks up that 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. 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 use these abilities, as humans did and still do.

• 44:35Speaker 06

  When we developed technologies like telegrams, telephones, 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.

• 44:57Ky Dickens?

  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.

• 45:14Ky Dickens?

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

• 45:41Speaker 11

  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.

• 45:48Ky Dickens?

  So Philip, does one feel different?

• 45:50Speaker 11

  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.

• 46:09Ky Dickens?

  Knowing that Dieta, Philip'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.

• 46:18Speaker 11

  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.

• 46:36Ky Dickens?

  And then I asked Philip if there's something he wished others knew about nonverbal communication, and his answer was an unexpected delight.

• 46:42Speaker 11

  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 want to 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.

• 47:08Ky Dickens?

  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.

• 47:14Speaker 11

  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.

• 47:22Ky Dickens?

  And finally, I asked what he wished more people understood about non-speaking voices, be it human or animal.

• 47:27Speaker 11

  Nonverbal 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.

• 47:37Ky Dickens?

  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?

• 47:44Speaker 11

  In my world, there's already a lot of telepathy between animals and humans, just as things are.

• 47:49Ky Dickens?

  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.

• 48:00Speaker 11

  Trees and 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 stop communicating. And subsequently, they stop 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.

• 48:25Ky Dickens?

  And here's Lily from season one.

• 48:26Speaker 12

  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.

• 48:41Ky Dickens?

  And here's Houston, who you met last season.

• 48:43Speaker 13

  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.

• 48:57Ky Dickens?

  And Anna Breytenbach also points out that this communication is not just limited to animals, which, yes, makes you wonder what else is conscious.

• 49:04Speaker 08

  The idea of consciousness that we humans have is also a bit of a construct. In my experience, everything, and I deliberately say thing, everything is infused with this life force, whether animate or seemingly inanimate. It's all energy. It's all energy. And the density with which those energy sort of units are packed together are what makes something appear to be solid or liquid or serial or just apparently invisible. So our human idea of consciousness is more like the lens of our inquiry as we're sort of looking in at one facet of the diamond of life. But everything is part of that onism, just pulsing with that.

• 49:45Speaker 08

  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 planting. 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 is what is wished for the most abundant,

• 50:27Speaker 08

  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 have emerged, but 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

• 51:11Speaker 08

  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 is-ness, 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 intelligent something is or isn't. But it doesn't take a mirror self-recognition test by a gorilla or an elephant to prove self-awareness. The smallest aphid on the smallest flower is very self-aware, has a life that is meaningful to them and matters to them.

• 51:56Ky Dickens?

  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.

• 52:44Ky Dickens?

  To dive in deeper, subscribe to our Backstage Pass by visiting our website. With it, you'll unlock access to bonus content like telepathy tests, Ask Me Anything interviews with myself and guests. You'll be able to enjoy the podcast ad-free, connect with other members on our Telepathy Tribe Discord, and hear and see exclusive content from the Telepathy Tapes Vault. Visit our website at thetelepathytapes.com for more info on how to subscribe to our Backstage Pass. It takes a village to make this podcast, and I want to thank our producers, Jesse Steed, Jill Pachesnik, and Katherine Ellis. Original music is by Rachel Cantu. Mix, mastering, and additional music is by Michael Urbino. Our associate producer is Selena Kennedy. Original artwork is by Ben Kandour Design. And I'm Kai Dickens, your executive producer, writer, and host.