The Telepathy Tapes - S2e3 The Consciousness Of Creativity Are Ideas Alive And Do They Choose Us

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

The mystery of inspiration begs the question: is the universe conscious and using us to create a vision of it’s own? We turn to the mystery of inspiration. Bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love; Big Magic) offers a provocative idea: that creativity doesn’t come from us, but to us. Ideas, she argues, are conscious entities—knocking at the doors of our imagination, looking for human partners to bring them into the world. Legendary music producer and author of The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin echoes that sentiment, describing artists as “antennas” tuned to a universal current, catching downloads that must then be shaped by craft and discipline. And Emmy-winning showrunner Liz Feldman (Dead to Me) shares her own uncanny experiences of creative lightning striking, when a fully-formed story seemed to arrive out of nowhere.Together, their perspectives point toward a paradox at the heart of all creation: effort and surrender. Inspiration demands our labor, yet it also requires letting go of control, trusting that we are not the sole architects but collaborators in something bigger.Threaded through these conversations is my own story—the moment when I tried and failed to launch The Telepathy Tapes as a film, surrendered it back to the universe, and only then discovered that it wanted to live as a podcast. That surrender, painful as it was, became the gateway.So are ideas conscious? Do they choose us, and the way they want to enter the world? In this episode, we follow the breadcrumbs—from mystical intuition to neuroscience—to ask whether creativity itself might be the clearest evidence that mind isn’t just a product of the brain, but part of a larger field of consciousness still waiting to be understood.-Join The Telepathy Tapes Backstage Pass 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.supercast.com.Thank you to our Sponsors!Visit CBDistillery.com promo code TAPES for 25% off your entire purchase.Visit Quince.com/tapes for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Visit happymammoth.com and use code TAPES for 15% off your entire first order today.Visit Progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance.Visit Graza.co and use TAPES to get 10% off your order.Get 15% off OneSkin with the code TAPES at https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpodUse code TAPES at jonesroadbeauty.com to get a Free Cool Gloss with your first purchase! #JonesRoadBeauty #adVisit FactorMeals.com/TAPES50OFF and use code TAPES50OFF to get 50% off your first box, plus free breakfast for 1 year. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi everyone, this is Kai Dickens, and you're listening to the telepathy tapes podcast. In season one, non-speakers showed us that telepathy is possible, shattering our assumptions about the world itself. This season, 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 telepathy tapes, and we're opening up the next channel. Bobby's USDA Organic, European-inspired infant formulas

were created by moms who couldn't find a formula that met their standards, so they decided to make it themselves. And thank goodness they did, because when my son was born, he was transferred to the neonatal unit for Billy Rubin light treatment immediately after a very scary and difficult birth.

Breastfeeding was nearly impossible for him in those first few weeks, and I wanted to find trustworthy formula like my relatives used in Sweden, and then we discovered. it was the only formula we trusted for our son's nutrition and we could effortlessly switch between breastfeeding and formula feeding and Bobby is the only formula he'd drink. Bobby formulas are designed for easy digestion just like breast milk and made with high quality premium ingredients you can feel

good about putting it in your baby's bottle. I love knowing that Bobby thinks through every detail, every step, every test, every ounce, so we parents don't have to. Every single batch goes through over 2,000 safety and quality checks, plus third-party testing for heavy metals before it even leaves their U.S. facility. Bobby was named the top organic infant formula in 2025 by parents' magazine, what to expect, and baby list. It's trusted by parents and loved by over 700,000 babies. If you want to feed with confidence too, head to highbobby.com. That's high bobby, hibobb i.e.com to find the formula trusted by parents and loved by their babies, 700,000 and counting. Chronological age is your birthday. Biological age is how old your body really is. And that's

the strongest predictor of disease risk and mortality. True diagnostic gives you your biological age and health markers, plus a simple personalized plan. Their true health test checks over 105 vitamins, minerals, nutrients, and health markers. It focuses on your energy, metabolism, inflammation, and nutrient status today. Order online and the kit ships right to your door. All you need to do is a quick finger prick at home. Drop it into the prepaid return package. Then you get your digital results with an easy-to-follow plan in your inbox.

And your only job is to follow the three recommendations for 90 days. Then retest to see the progress. Diagnostic uses advanced epigenetic testing to analyze over 1 million biomarkers. It identifies the three most important actions you can take over 90 days to improve your health, and it's trusted by top longevity clinics and health professionals, not just consumers at home. Right now, my listeners can get 20% off at TrueDiagnostics.com, using code tapes at checkout. That's truediagnostic.com, T-R-U-D-I-G-N-O-S-T-I-C dot com, and use code tapes for 20% off today.

choose true age, true health, or the combo kit as a one-time purchase or subscription. In the last two episodes, we explored the idea that consciousness cannot live us, that it can reach across the divide of death and still connect with us. And if all that's true, what on earth is it doing with us while we're alive? Is it just a passive field that we're swimming in? Or could it be choosing us to make its will manifest, to create and transform and bring something into the world that wasn't here before? If there's one thing that we can appear to observe about the universe is that it loves to create.

It loves to create and it loves to expand. And it loves to make something out of nothing. And it loves to take what is already there and transform it into something else. And then it loves to blow it up and start over again. That's Elizabeth Gilbert, one of the most widely read authors of our time. You probably know her from her best-selling book-turned movie, Eat, Pray, Love. And what I believe about the nature of creativity is that ideas are, conscious entities outside of ourselves that do not come from us but to us.

Artists are sort of antennae who absorb ideas, that ideas swirl around the world looking for human collaborators, knocking on our doors and tapping on our shoulders and coming to us in the form of inspiration. This may sound like a wild idea, but stay with me, because as fanciful as it sounds, countless artists and inventors across history have described something similar, ideas or inspirations or inspiration, coming to them, often fully formed from somewhere outside of themselves. And today, we'll explore what this mysterious force might be seeking in its human collaborators, what makes it flourish, what makes it vanish, and what it might be asking of us in return.

I believe that it's like a download, and all of the material that we work with comes from outside of ourselves. We participate, but it doesn't start with us. This is legendary music producer Rick Rubin. He co-founded Def Jam Records and was co-president of Columbia Records. He's produced for seemingly everyone, from LL Cool J to the Beastie Boys, to run DMC, Lady Gaga, Metallica, ACDC, Johnny Cash, Tom Petty, Mick Jagger, Cheryl Crow, and everyone in between. He's won nine Grammys and was named one of times 100 most influential people in the world. The best artists seem to have an antenna open to whatever the universe wants to happen now in this moment.

the information comes in and it's magic. And then we're the craftsmen. We get to make the physical embodiment of it. It doesn't happen by itself. We don't channel it and there it is. We channel it and we have to present it. And two different artists can channel the same thing and then make what they make and it'll be two different things.

If you have the same movie script and give it to several different great directors, they'll make totally different movies, even though the script is the same, the story is the same. The download is the script. It's not the end product. The end product is through our personal filter. Some artists may not even be aware of their engagement with this force, but the ones we're talking with today, acknowledge it, marvel at it, and work with it. And here's Elizabeth Gilbert again. What I like to tell people is that when you call in inspiration, let it find you at your desk already working. I've got my desk set up and I've got my notes set up and I've got my laptop there. And the only rule is you are not

allowed to stand up from this desk for 60 minutes and you are not allowed to look at the internet. The really good day of writing for me isn't about how well the writing went. It's did you sit there for 60 minutes? Did you set an art trap? Like were you available so that if ideas came, they could find you at your desk? And then get up and walk away and say, I showed up, like let the record show. I was here present to the possibility of a miracle today. And then the next day I do the same. the same and eventually what happens is that I start getting into a flow and then here's where the big magic trick is. The first day that I get into a flow and the timer goes off and I want to keep writing, I'm not allowed to. I have to turn the timer off and get up and walk away and I leave

a sentence, this is a Hemingway trick, you leave a sentence half finished, like you leave right in the middle of the sentence. So when you come back to work the next day, you immediately are pulled back into the river of the thing. So if I sit there on the day when the work is flowing, and I know this from experience, if I write for three hours and it's amazing, I've just killed any chance that I'm going to write the next day. I'm going to sit down and the flow state's going to be over because I closed the loop, and I'm going to be back sort of lost and bewildered and also tired from overworking the day before. So part of my discipline is not overdoing it at the beginning. I have a line in my book, Big Magic, quoting a physicist who said, art may seem like magic, but it isn't. It's magical,

but it's not magic. And I humbly disagree and say that it is both of those things. It is magical, and it is also magic. Elizabeth Gilbert mentioned her book, Big Magic, Creative Living Beyond Fear, which is about the nature of inspiration and how to approach life from the position of creativity. It's a book I love, and one of my takeaways was the idea that it's simply not possible. for inspiration, creativity, big magic, whatever you want to call it, to come only from inside ourselves. And ideas also seem to decide how and when they want to come into the world. And that type of big magic is the reason the telepathy tapes became a podcast in the first place. We'll get to that story later in the episode.

I think that we did a great disservice to the notion of art when we took away the idea of an externalized genius that you're communicating with. The Romans believed that a genius, what we call a genius, very similar to the word genie, was a spirit that lived in your home and that helped you, kind of like a house elf, like a little helpful spirit. And if families lived and resided in the same sorts of homes for a long time, that genius was passed from generation to generation. So it would be said, this family has a genius for music. This family has a genius for political oration. So the genius was in. inherited, not through DNA, but through the place you were living. It lived in the well near where

you lived. It lived in the olive tree by your house. It was this disembodied spirit. And the beautiful thing about that notion of an externalized genius is that the pressure is not so much on you to live up to the idea, right? Today, we often imagine inspiration lives only inside our brains. But that's not how it used to be seen. In ancient Greece, the muses were considered goddess of inspiration, the ones who sparked poetry, music, dance, and even history itself. And our language still remembers this. In Greek, music literally means the art of the muses, and a museum was a place devoted to them. And then the centuries went by and our German romantics absorbed that idea into themselves and they became geniuses. I am a genius. There is no external. There is no

muse, actually. Nothing's inspiring me but me, right? I mean, it's so deeply massive. It's so deeply Western. It's so deeply empirical. I am the only actor here, right? And not surprisingly, those people kind of lost their minds, right? And they fell into tremendous depression and despair because you can't always deliver genius. Because genius is also fleeting. Sometimes it's there. Sometimes it's not. It's a spirit that appears and disappears. It can't be controlled. If it's all on your shoulders, you can only do so much, knowing that you can tap into a an infinite resource is really helpful. The ongoing question between consciousness and ideas and creators is, do you want to make something together? And that relationship between a human being's effort, our will, our labor, and the mystery of creativity is what makes art.

So that's how I've always experienced creativity and most creative people that I know have also always experienced it. that way. I wanted to speak with another writer who's experienced this. So I called up my brilliant friend Liz Feldman. She's the creator and executive producer of the hit Netflix show, Dead to Me. So Dead To Me came to me in a different way than any other idea that I'd had. Dead to Me was not a concept that Liz Feldman had workshoped and written over and over. In fact, up until then, Liz was best known as a comedy writer for sitcoms. Sitcoms are three jokes a page. That's sort of the directive. You know, it's a easy little story that

starts in one place and ends in that exact place, you know, return to stasis. So on this day, when Liz's breakthrough idea came into the world, I had been going through a really difficult time in my life. I had just turned 40 and I was set up on these meetings that we get set up on as writers and producers. And I was told there are these two actresses who want to make a show together. And they have all these ideas and I don't have to come up with anything. And I showed up and I sit down and they go, we're sick of our ideas. Do you have any? No pressure. I was like, oh, God. I really didn't. I really had nothing. I didn't have anything in my back pocket. I was panicked. And I sort of vamped. I stalled. And then like a flash, like this weird moment of clarity, this idea sort of fell into my head. It was weird. It dropped into my head from the ether. And it was the rough idea for what would become dead to me.

A show with a storyline so fresh and original, you would have thought it had been workshoped for years. And I thought, where did that come from? Like, why did I think of that? And the way I look at it now is that it felt like channeling, I guess. It just was sort of instant and really fast. So I worked on it and worked on it, and I, you know, kept bringing this developing thing back to these two. wonderful actresses and about three months into the process, they passed. And I was like, oh, man, I really, I really liked this idea. And so I tried to, you know, go back and think of

other ideas that were more in line with what people were used to me bringing to them, but I couldn't let it go. So I pitched it and four of the places that we went to wanted to buy it. And her idea led to the creation of a whole new genre called Traumody, and Dead to Me was nominated for six Emmys and a Golden Globe. And that idea chose Liz Feldman, who up to then, had been known for mostly writing sitcoms. And just like I had never made a podcast before, I don't think ideas pigeonhole creators based on their resumes. If ideas can choose us out of the ether, maybe they can also choose to leave us. That would mean they're not just looking for an open antenna, but they're actually looking for the right collaborator and at the right

moment. I think we both know people in our lives who are incredibly talented and probably do some channeling of their own where they have these brilliant ideas. But if you don't have the engine behind it, if you don't have the inertia that you keep creating to push you forward, you know, it will sort of disappear back into the ether. Which makes the pairing feel very personal, almost like they're watching us and know if we're ready and willing and have the right attitude. And it makes you wonder about this relationship. If we can't give an idea what it needs, will it move on? Liz Gilbert has a remarkable story that answers this question.

So I had an idea for a novel years ago, and it was going to be the book that I was going to write after Eat, Pray, Love. And it was based on a story that my now ex-husband had told me he was and is a Brazilian man who grew up in Brazil in the 1960s. and told me this incredible story about this massive project that the Brazilian government tried to take on in the 1960s to build a super highway right through the Amazon jungle. And what a complete catastrophe it was. And it was a catastrophe not only because of corruption and disorganization, but also because the Amazon jungle refused to have a giant highway built through it and actually swallowed whatever efforts they made.

every time the rainy season came, the jungle would just eat the road that they had built and eat all of their equipment and it just felt like so compelling and kind of magical and interesting to me. So I started working on this book and then life happens and life often happens and we had an emergency in our relationship, which is that my then partner was not allowed admittance into the United States on his Brazilian passport and we had to leave the country and the only way I could get him back in the country was if we got married. And so all of this personal stuff happened, and I put the novel aside. And then I ended up writing a book about that experience that was my book committed. So that took two, three years. And the whole time, all the notes, everything from my

novel were waiting for me. I came back to start working on the book, and it was gone. And the only way I can describe it is that it's like the spirit that imbibes a creative project, the living energy field within this thing had disappeared. And it just, it didn't matter how much I poked and prodded at it. It was gone. Like the idea had just departed and turned to dust. And around that same time, I met the novelist Anne Patchett for the first time, who I had always admired. And we met at a conference and became friends. And I heard her speak and she was such a dazzling speaker that I ran up to her afterwards and I was like, you're amazing. And she grabbed me and she did this very on Ann Patchett thing. She kissed me on the lips and she said, you're amazing and I love you. And we

became friends and pen pals. And the years went by and she mentioned in a letter that she was working on a novel about the Amazon jungle. And I thought, well, that's interesting. And I told her that I had been working on a novel about the Amazon jungle, but that it had disappeared. And I asked her what her book was about. And she said it was too soon to know, but that she was still in early stages. about a year after that we met in person only for the second time. And we went out to breakfast and at that point she had over 100 pages of the book written. And I said, tell me about your novel. What's it about? And she said, you first. You tell me what your Amazon novel was about.

And I said it was about this very lonely spinster, brilliant woman, middle-aged woman from Minnesota who works for a giant multinational corporation who is desperately and quietly in love with her married boss. he gets involved in a big giant project down in the Amazon, sends a bunch of people on money down there, the people in the money disappear, and he sends this character down to find the money and the people and figure out what happened, and it's also a love story. And Anne looked at me and said, you have got to be fucking kidding me. And I said, why? What's your Amazon novel about? And she said, It's about this very lonely sad spinster in Minnesota who works for a multinational corporation who is desperately and quietly in love with her married boss, whose boss gets involved in a big, shady international deal in the Amazon, sends a bunch of people and some money down there,

the people and the money disappear, and the woman is sent down to figure out what happens, and it's also a love story. And, you know, needless to say, this is not a genre. Like, this is not like a vampire romance. The specificity was insane. It was exactly the same book. And then like pregnant women trying to figure out when they got pregnant, we started trying to figure out when she got the idea and when I lost the idea.

And it was around the same exact time. And then our beautiful big magic theory of it is that it got exchanged in the kiss. that my novel jumped like a virus into her mind and into her antenna of consciousness because it could see that I wasn't going to do it. Like, it could see that it had a collaborator who didn't give it its full attention. And here was a novelist who was available and ready for the idea. And that book became State of Wonder, which is my favorite Anne Patch of novel. And for years she called it our Amazon novel.

that as though we had co-parented it, although what I think is that I was like it's incubator, foster mama novelist that the idea stayed with for a while until it grew and then moved over to her. So that is the most profound example I've ever had personally of big magic. But the concept of a download coming all at once is well documented in literature. Take for instance Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. She described in the book's introduction, having a waking dream, and she said the story appears. drew her hole. And director James Cameron said the idea for Terminator came to him in a dream while he was sick in Rome. He saw the image of a metallic figure emerging from fire. And that

single image became the basis of the entire franchise. Artist and thinkers have long tried to catch inspiration in the fragile space between waking and sleep. Thomas Edison would drift off in a chair, steel balls clutched in his hand. So when he nodded off and they fell to the floor, he'd wake up and snatch whatever ideas had just come through. Even Einstein swore by naps and and daydreams as portals to the insights that reshaped our world. Starting the year with a wardrobe refresh, Quince has you covered with luxe essentials that feel effortless and look polished. They're perfect for layering, mixing, and building a wardrobe that lasts. Their versatile styles make it easy to reach for them day after day. Quince has all

the staples covered from soft Mongolian cashmere sweaters that feel like designer pieces without the markup to 100% silk tops and skirts for easy dressing up to perfectly cut denim for everyday wear. Their wardrobe essentials are crafted to less season after season. Their Italian wool coats are real standouts. They're beautifully tailored, soft to the touch, and built to carry you through years of wear, not just one season. The quality shows in every detail, the stitching, the fit, the fabrics. Every piece is thoughtfully designed to be your new wardrobe essential. And like everything from Quince, each piece is made with premium materials in ethical, trusted factories, then priced far below what other luxury brands charge. I'm absolutely loving my new washable stretch silk

Palazzo pants. They're elegant and comfortable, and it's a staple I'm buying for my best friends this year. Refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Don't wait. Go to quince.com slash tapes for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash tapes to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash tapes. This episode of the telepathy tapes is brought to you by Graza. Most people know I love to cook for my friends. And lately, what's taken my food to that next level is Graza. Graza is my olive oil of choice. It's delicious, easy to use extra virgin olive oil at an affordable everyday price. Graza is always fresh. They pick, press, and bottle all their olives in the same season. You can even see the harvest date on every bottle. Graza has not one, but two extra virgin olive oils

to stock your kitchen. And you can choose between squeeze or glass bottles. There's sizzle, their everyday cooking oil that's perfect for roasting, sauteing, and well, anything you cook. And then they also have drizzle, a super punchy, flavorful finishing oil that's great for dipping bread, whipping up a salad dressing, or even drizzling over ice cream. It's seriously my favorite olive oil to use. Healthy eating is something I prioritize. And olive oil is the timeless classic, healthiest fat I add to my meals. It's the healthy fat we all need for our brain and heart. You'll get 10% off your first order of any olive oil on their site. But I wholeheartedly recommend the Graza Duo. You'll receive two bottles of extra virgin olive oil, sizzle for cooking and drizzle for finishing with an extra kick of bold flavor.

So head to graza.com and use tapes to get 10% off and get cooking on your next chef quality meal. But it's not just about being struck by an idea. You must have a regular practice set up in order to receive this big magic. And here's music producer Rick Rubin again. The inspiration doesn't come without the work ethic part. It's like a partnership. And it takes a great amount to work. If you're not dedicated to it, it will not come.

It's like fishing, you know. If you're not in the boat, fishing, you're not going to catch any fish. You have to get in the boat. You have to put your hook in the water and you have to wait. Liz Feldman agrees that in order to receive an idea, you must also work hard and diligently for that door of inspiration to remain open. My father reminded me of it when I was, you know, first out here, that the harder you work, the luckier you get.

And that's just true because you're creating your own energy. momentum. You know, you're moving yourself forward, whether you're being, you know, necessarily paid for it or not. And I just kept at it. And I had always wanted to work for Ellen. And when her talk show premiered, I was totally unemployed. I would sit at home and I would just write monologues for her, just to see if I could do it. And then I had no idea that I'd have the opportunity to give her those monologues, but a few years later, I did. And I got the opportunity to submit a packet for her. And I dusted off those old monologues. I wrote a new one and I sent it, you know, and it was just an exercise I was doing, but I was working. If I've ever had a stroke of genius, it was when I was open

to receiving, and that might even be involuntarily because I just was at a low point or I was depleted. I honestly don't think I have any control over it. I actually think it's the lack of control that allows me to receive. Because I often come up with ideas in that liminal state between being awake and asleep. It's not like I'm trying to think. I'm actually trying not to think. And that's when something will come to me. And in the sake of dead to me, I was so depleted. I couldn't have tried to really think of something if I wanted to when I have no choice but to be vulnerable, and I'm living in my authenticity. That's when I've had those moments. These aren't just ideas shared by artists. They're shared by many great thinkers. Shrinivasa

Ramunajan, the legendary Indian mathematician, believed his equations did not come from him at all. He saw himself as a receiver, a vessel. His job was to simply listen and to take down what was being given. He credited his inspiration to Namagiri, a Hindu goddess. He said that sometimes in dreams, he would see a red screen and that a hand would write a woman. mathematical formulas on it. Other times, he said the math was whispered into his ear. He'd just wake up and write them down. And the complex formulas turned out to be right.

And mind you, he had no formal math education, which makes his account even more interesting. And this concept of inspiration or ideas kind of living in the ether around us, tapping on the shoulder of someone in a state ready to receive them, might actually have a complementary scientific theory proposed by Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrick. Morphic resonance is a hypothesis I first put forward. in 1981, I'm suggesting that the whole universe has a kind of memory. The so-called laws of nature actually more like habits. They evolve along with the universe.

This means that when you make a new chemical compound and crystallize it, the first time you make the crystals that won't be a habit, they haven't happened before. But after they've crystallized, and it often takes months or years for the first crystals to form, then it should be easier for the same thing to crystallize again. anywhere in the world. And the third and fourth and fifth time it should get easier and easier. And this is actually just what chemists find. Crystals get easy to crystallize. Some say this can be explained because chemists have learned the right conditions and techniques to make crystal compounds form quicker. But other thinkers, like Sheldrake,

suggest something deeper, that once a new idea or form appears in nature, it somehow becomes easier for the same form to appear again and again, as if nature itself develops habits or has the collective memory of its own. Morphic resonance also means that if you train animals like rats to learn a new trick in one place, then rats all around the world should be able to learn the same trick more quickly. And indeed, experiments have shown that does happen. So it's a kind of collective memory. And it's a bit like what the psychologist Jung called the collective unconscious in humans,

a kind of collective memory on which we all draw and to which we all contribute. Basically, what Sheldrick is describing here is that if an idea was once impossible to conceive of like a ceiling, once it's reached, it becomes the floor. And sometimes that new floor spreads out across the world touching the feet of many waiting thinkers all at once. And history is full of examples where the same idea shows up in two places at once, as if it's in the air looking for someone to bring it to life. Take the telephone. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and Alicia Gray both filed patents for the telephone

hours apart on the exact same day. Or take evolution, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace came up with the theory of natural selection completely independently, on opposite sides of the world and within weeks of each other. And even the light bulb, Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan, developed almost identical carbon filament bulbs within months of each other, and they were working independently on opposite sides of the Atlantic. It's as if ideas have their own timing, their own urgency, and when they're ready to be born, they'll knock on as many doors as it takes. Rick Rubin has witnessed this many times over his long influential career. It happens all the time.

The idea is ripe. And if you don't do it, and if it's meant to be, it will happen. And it won't happen because someone overhears it. It'll happen because there'll be another person with a good antenna who's picking it up. It's time. The universe is willing it to be. And that's how we see movements in art happen. When there's a movement in art, it doesn't happen because one artist sees another artist and starts copying them.

The same types of things start arriving all over the world. One or two people here, one or two people there, and then more people. And it takes on a life of its own. Where extensions of this universal energy, we're like the hands for this consciousness to bring these creations into the physical world. The part that's created in our brain is what to do with the information when it comes in. The information comes in and it's magic. We participate, but it doesn't start with us. All of the material that we work with comes from outside of ourselves.

Everything we've ever experienced in our life that we remember and that we don't is all part of the storehouse of information that we can grab from. Creator of Dead to Me, Liz Feldman, has also noticed this. More often than not, when I have an idea that I don't pursue, I see it pop up somewhere else. Even sometimes when I have an idea that I do pursue, I see another version of it popping up somewhere else. So I do believe in a zeitgeist. I do believe that there's a collective consciousness and there are stories that need to be told. And I think ultimately they try to find the best vessel to tell them.

And sometimes this big magic or creative current can move through a group of close people collectively. Great athletes talk about being in the flow with their teammates. And it happens to great bands too. Something happens when artists have played together for a long time where there's a psychic connection between them. They'll just know when to change and they do it all together. It's not planned out. It's not rehearsed. There's just this liquid sense of movement where they're functioning as one. A band that I get to see do this a lot are the red hot chili peppers.

They've been playing together for 40 years. They're great musicians, and the psychic connection with them is so deep that often they'll come out on stage, not knowing what they're going to play. I don't mean what's on they're going to play. They'll just start playing something none of them have ever played before, and it just comes together in the moment. Totally improvisational. And biologist, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, says we see this in nature all the time. I think all social animals are linked together by what I call social fields, invisible fields that link them together. It's most obvious with flocks of birds and schools of fish.

We have flocks here in England which have hundreds of thousands of birds, and the whole group can turn almost at the same time without bumping into each other. Not only do the birds know where the others are, they know where they're going to go, and I think there's a field of which they're all part. And we're all used to the idea of invisible fields that stretch out beyond material objects. It's the gravitational field beyond the earth, the magnetic field beyond a magnet, and the radio-electromagnetic waves beyond a cell phone. And in a similar way, I think our minds are field-like structures which stretch out beyond our brains,

invisibly, just like all the other fields. It happens a lot in jazz, too. In jazz we get to see people maybe who haven't played much together before, but who are so in tune with an energy that's happening in the room that they know when to play, when not to play, when to leave space, when to add more, when one notes enough. Which reminds me of another powerful voice we've heard from on the show already, a non-speaker named Kyle that you met in episode 8 last season.

He doesn't speak, but he can sing and play music. And when I was with him in England this past summer, I witnessed something remarkable. But first, here's his mom, Caroline, to give a bit of backstory. My name is Caroline, and I have a non-speaking son called Kyle. We live in a lovely little village called Quithian on North Cornwall Coast. He was diagnosed with non-speaking autism when he was two and a half.

And I think he was about 20 years old. When somebody said to me, you know, have you thought about Carl having music therapy? And I said, no, but anyway, I'll have a go. I'll give anything a go. And then when the music therapist came, I was thinking I was making tea in the kitchen. She said, Caroline, want you to see? this. And I said, okay, so I went into the living room. And there was Kyle at her keyboard playing dream, dream, dream and singing along to it. And I remember just being gobsmacked and just going,

hang on a minute, like what? And not only was he just singing that song, he then just kind of showed us that he had a whole repertoire of songs, hundreds of songs. He'd remembered them like he'd arched And mind you, Kyle had never had a music lesson before. So after 20 years of being locked in his body, Kyle showed that he can both sing and play music. And I think music therapy was just a way of that door being open to him. So from his first music therapy session, Kyle showed us that he not only could sing with perfect pitch, but he also could play a melody on her keyboard. So you can imagine that that was pretty light or inspiring, really.

And it wasn't just that Kyle could remember songs he'd heard. He was also improvising and composing music in real time. I spoke with Kyle's music teacher about his process when I visited them in England last summer. I think this is the most authentic Kyle in this very free, flowing, improvised form of music. So this is not a song that's out there. No.

This isn't a structured, pre-composed song. This is Kyle's free flow, improvisation, vocal. Kyle's deciding the key and the pace and where our improvisation is going to go. And I'll just follow. I don't think it's a language that we know. I think it's something that he channels maybe. He kind of pulls it from outside of the kind of learnt, wrote type of singing that one would do. learn a nursery rhyme or if you learn pop song. So it's coming from this intended place from somewhere

else. I witness Kyle do this twice in England, once at home and once during a live performance. And each time, it felt almost like witnessing something holy, though he doesn't use words in his daily life. A river of song moves through him. It's pure and lyrical and just unstoppable. And when he begins, it feels as though he's sweeping the room clear and making space for the music, wherever is coming from to take center stage. Kyle will go on as long as he feels he wants to. I call that streaming consciousness when he does that. He's taking that from the wider field and he's bringing it here like a journey, if you like.

That's what he's here to do. He's here to kind of bring music to his physical experience. Throughout the music world, there are incredible ideas of this type of inspiration. Paul McCartney has talked about how the song yesterday came to him all at once in a dream. I just thought of it. I dreamed it. Here's Sir Paul McCartney himself on an episode of McCartney, a life in lyrics, trying to determine the origins of the song. Though he dreamed it, was it truly original,

or might it have entered his mind from somewhere else? So he first asked John Lennon if he'd heard it before. He said, well, I don't know. I never heard it. So then I went to George Martin. He'll know. He's got a much wider knowledge. I said, what's this? I don't know.

I said, well, I don't know. I dreamed him. Anyway, after a couple of weeks of this, it became clear that no one knew it, and it didn't exist except in my head. And so I claimed it. There are so many musicians who talk about the idea of a download. I talked to one songwriter who said if she doesn't resonate with a song and therefore doesn't write it down and record it, she might hear it on the radio months later. Here's Elizabeth Gilbert again. One of my favorite interviews I ever got to do when I was a journalist was with the musician Tom Waits.

What he said was that there were times when he would be. driving like on that LA freeway, and this is back before a smartphone, right, long ago, like in the 70s. And he would hear a snippet of a beautiful song come through the atmosphere into his mind. And he would, in his early days as an artist that would make him panicked because he couldn't get it, he couldn't grab it, and he knew he was going to lose it. And that was part of his torment of being a very romantically tormented artist. But in his more mature years and middle age when that would happen. He would say to the idea, can't you see it? I'm driving. Do I look like I have a piano here? Like, I'm on the middle of the highway. Like in rush hour traffic, there's nothing I can do

about you right now. If you're serious about wanting to be a song, you know that I spend eight hours a day in the studio the next time you see me in the studio, come and see me then. Otherwise, stop bothering me and go bother Leonard Cohen. That was his exact line. And it's not just catching an idea seemingly out of thin air. Sometimes an idea might actually chase you down. Here's Elizabeth Gilbert again. So Ruth Stone was an Appalachian poet who grew up in rural Virginia, and I met her around 1998 or nine, that I met her, and she was very old by that point already. She told me this story in person, and it blew my mind, and I loved it and her. She said she used to be working in the fields on the farm and she would feel and hear a poem coming toward her and the experience that she

had of it, the somatic experience. And I think creativity and inspiration often arrives as like a bodily experience, even more than an intellectual one, was a feeling that something was galloping toward her. She would feel this idea galloping toward her across the field. And if she wasn't prepared for it, it would gallop right through her. Like it just would move through her entire body and she'd be like, and like this thing moved through her and it was gone. But if she felt it galloping toward her, she would start running, and her words, run like hell to the house,

to grab a piece of paper and a pencil. And as it moved through her, she would collect it and she would write the words down on the page, which is already amazing. But then she said that sometimes this even more magical experience would happen where it would be running through her and it would be almost through her, and she would reach out and she said she would catch it

by the tail as it was moving through her and running away from her and pull it back into her with one hand, while with the other hand she was writing the poem from the last word to the first because it was coming back in through her backwards, and it would come out on the page reversed. And that story gives me chills, because it's not just about catching the poem or the idea. it's about letting it have its way with you.

It's about surrender. What all of these stories have in common is the reminder that we are partners, not owners of the creative force. Our job is not to trap ideas or hoard them or force them to stay. And it's not on us to determine the outcome or impact in the world.

I think that ideas want to be made manifest and they can't be in this realm on this planet except through human collaboration. And I think ideas are interested in us because we seem to be able to hear them. And we don't have a lot of evidence that other animals hear them the way we hear them. One of my definitions of art that I love is making something more beautiful than it needs to be. It's so unpragmatic, you know. It's like, why are we called to adorn the world in the way that we seem to be called to adorn the world

when there's no apparent pragmatic use of it? we need a chair, you could just make a very, very pragmatic chair, and yet there are like tens of thousands of examples of human creativity of different kinds of chairs. Like, why do we take time that we don't have in a short and mortal life resources that we might not have to make something we just feel called to? We like to. It seems to be deeply satisfying. And that's why I think ideas like working with us. So I think what an idea is looking for in a human collaborator is somebody who's game, somebody who is like, I'm going to do this thing for no reason and not attach too much stress to what the outcome of it is going to be. And that sentiment is where all of this stopped

being theory for me and became my own story. When I first started the telepathy tapes journey, the world I was stepping into felt enormous. There were researchers and parents and scientists and so many others who had been experiencing telepathy and non-speakers for decades. But the Pieces were scattered, living in separate silos, and from all over the world. I was convinced that the only way to convey the magnitude of what I was witnessing was to make a multi-part documentary series. Anything less felt like it would underserved the story. I became obsessed with this outcome.

And I did what filmmakers do. I took meetings. I pitched. I tried to make the vision real. But the story did not fit into an easy box. And when the final rejection came in, I felt like I'd failed everyone, the families, the non-speakers, the scientists, the story is. itself. And I remember going to my bedroom and closing the door and saying out loud to whatever

force brings idea to life. Okay, I've tried. I've given this everything. I've left nothing on the field, and somehow I have failed. So I'm giving this back to you, universe. Go find another person to tell this story or to bring it into the world because clearly I'm not the one to do it. And this was not easy, I was saying it through tears, but I essentially gave it back to the universe. I was so obsessed with how it was supposed to go that I couldn't see anything else. And just days after I let go, it hit me with total clarity. This story wanted to be a podcast. It wanted to be longer and much more deeply personal and even portable, something people could experience in their most private collected moments on walks or in cars. And it was only when I surrendered that the path forward revealed itself. I had never

made a podcast before, but the idea didn't care. It wanted to be made and it knew how it wanted to get into the world. This is the central paradox of a creative life. It's both effort and surrender simultaneously to completely opposite polarities of human thought. And I actually think that duality becomes, it's like a battery. This is the positive and negative charge that creativity has to bounce between in order to create art or any kind of inspiration, any kind of idea. So it makes you a me have to kind of blow my brain out into a much bigger arena of consciousness where I can hold these two opposite thoughts while I'm working and writing, which is this is the most important thing and this is not important at all. And both of those things have to be simultaneously true.

Because if you only surrender, right, and you don't bring your effort and you don't bring your labor and you don't bring your discipline, then the thing never happens. And if you only bring your labor and your effort and your discipline, you burn yourself out because you become so obsessed with this idea that you are the master of the universe making this thing or a total failure. So a lot of it is about releasing outcome and recognizing that the outcome of the thing is none of your business, but the labor is. So the surrender is surrendering what is this going to become? Is this going to be profitable? Is anybody going to be interested in this? Am I going to be criticized. Am I not even going to be seen enough to be criticized? You know, all of these what

ifs that your fear starts to generate that push creativity away. So yes, surrender is an equal 50% of the operation. Here's writer and executive producer Liz Feldman again. It's the experience of creating that is the gift and the result or the outcome is just the bow that you tie around the gift. And I've learned that I can't put my value or the value of the work in the outcome. I have to put the value in the experience that I had along the way. Truly, I wasn't trying to make a hit show. I in no way thought that it would sort of break that barrier. I was just imagining that it could reach people.

And I really had that as my intention in making the show. Creativity is a gift in this universe, and you're entitled to engage with it and play with it, but you're actually not entitled to the outcome. The Bhagavagita says that you are entitled to the labor, you are not entitled to the fruit of the labor, and there you go. And I love that they say that you're entitled to the labor, this multi-thousand-year-old wisdom text. It doesn't say you're obliged to the labor.

It doesn't say that you're forced to labor. It says you're entitled. What a beautiful way to say it. You're entitled to the joy of the labor. that the work itself becomes its own reward. But you are not entitled to anything after that. And this is a really difficult thing for a modern Western mind to wrap itself around because so much of our culture is about what we are entitled to.

And so much of our anger in our culture comes from what we think we are entitled to. Creating for creativity's sake, that might be one of the secrets to a happy life. And yes, that might mean untethering yourself from, the outcome of what you're creating, whether it's respect or acclaim or riches or fame. And it's funny, because when I was writing this episode, I kind of looked back on my life and realize that energetically pouring myself into creative pursuits, even if they might not end up being profitable ever, has kind of been like a shield or even like a superpower, buffering me from the pain and disappointment that comes from just living life. And what's amazing, for me at least, is when I'm

working on something, even though I'm often alone in a room, I don't feel alone. I actually feel fully seen as if the act connects me to something vast and bigger. And here's Liz Gilbert again. The thing that's happening at this moment in history is this epidemic of loneliness and deep loneliness. And I don't think that's because people are not connecting to other human beings because there's plenty of that. I think it's because people are not connecting to the unseen world. And that humans who don't connect to the unseen world suffer tremendous despair and loneliness. The loneliest times of my life, there was someone in the room and usually someone in the bed. There's no deeper loneliness that I have ever experienced than when I am not in connection with somebody who's in the room with me.

The deepest sense of well-being and wholeness and connection that I have ever experienced is when I appear to be alone and when I appear to be doing nothing at all but sitting in deep silence. and I'm opening myself to receiving multiple layers of guidance and miracle from every corner of the cosmos. And that is not because I am special, special. That is because I am paying attention. Liz Feldman, the creator of Dead to Me and No Good Deed, has also experienced firsthand this relationship between reduced anxiety, loneliness, and creativity. I definitely suffer from anxiety, and I have noticed unequivocably very very much. that it peaks when I'm not working, when I'm not being creative, when I'm not in collaboration

with other people. And, you know, during the writer's strike, I really had a difficult time. I was anxious, I was depressed, I was really untethered from my purpose, from, you know, the thing that makes my soul thing. And as soon as I went back to work, I was, myself again. And I don't want to just be a workaholic, but it's not just the work. It is the creativity. I am my happiest when I am creating. Even if that means I'm making up a silly story to tell my daughter. There's one more voice I want to bring back into this conversation. Martha Beck has triple degrees from Harvard, you know, like we all do. You met Martha Beck in the first episode this season. She had a near-death experience while under anesthesia that transformed

her recalibrating her life to be all about joy. And though she was on an impressive academic track at Harvard, she became so much more, including Oprah Winfrey calling her her life coach. But most recently, she wrote a book on this exact topic. And the takeaway is that creativity reduces anxiety. The book is called Beyond Anxiety. And I wrote it because there has been a huge upsurge in the level of anxiety that humans are experiencing everywhere in the world. And a lot of my clients were experiencing it, and I wanted to understand it and see what I could do to help. What I realized, as I did the research, is that most of anxiety is based in the part of the brain that tells stories, which is the left hemisphere. And it's always about something bad is going to happen

in the future. I'm going to lose something. I'm bad. I've done something wrong. These are all story-based thoughts. You don't find frogs and eagles worrying about these things. So that's in the left hemisphere of the brain. And then I realized that the same mechanism that gets activated in anxiety, the same physiological structures on the left hemisphere are mirrored on the right hemisphere. But when you activate them in the right hemisphere, they exhibit themselves as creativity. So the counterpart to anxiety is creativity. And I realize there's a lot of research that shows anxiety shuts down creativity. There's virtually no research to see if the opposite happens, if creativity shuts down anxiety.

So I started doing my own research, doing experiments. This was during the pandemic. So I had a lot of audiences on Zoom where I could ask and do my own sort of little numeric exercises to see if people turned on the creative parts of their brains with their anxiety drop. and without exception, it did. It drops to zero in most people. If I would give them just little brain challenges that I knew would activate the right hemisphere of the brain,

which, by the way, takes in the whole brain. It's not the right or the left. The left hemisphere cuts out the information that's coming from the right, or it can. The right hemisphere is inclusive and connective, and it embraces everything we know and puts it together in creative ways. The reason I called the book,

beyond anxiety is that a third of it is about anxiety and two-thirds of it are about what happens when you abandon anxiety, when you are a traitor to suffering. And what happens is the most explosive, joyful creativity. And the parts of the brain that do the creative stuff are contiguous with and sometimes overlapping the parts that experience mystical states. And so that starts to happen. and there's just a rapid transformation from a tiny scared creature into a vast field of energy that is working with this little human mechanism to create things that have never existed before. We've known for a long time anxiety shuts down creativity. But I believe it's also true that creativity shuts down anxiety.

And I could tell you all the brain stuff, but it would take a long time. The point I want to make is that when we choose creativity and we leave anxiety, we abandon our anxiety, we not only start making things that the world has never seen before, we actually begin to overlap with the parts of the world and with our own consciousness that experience mystical states. Creativity as a balm for anxiety and a bridge to the mystical is something that everyone in this episode agrees with and feels intuitively. creativity is the blueprint of reality itself. Everything began as a thought first. Our cities, our medicine, our inventions, and laws, art,

all of it came into being through creativity. And maybe that's not only true of human history, but of the galaxy, the planet, and the universe. Maybe all of it was someone or something's thought or creation. Here's Elizabeth Gilbert again. We call the universe creation, right? So there's an energy that's happening from the farthest distant galaxies. creation isn't something that happened once and then ended. It's this ongoing story that's constantly in evolution.

Nearly every spiritual tradition tells us the same story. The world was first imagined, then spoken into form. A thought became matter or creation. My beloved friend Martha Beck defines magic as the thing that wants to happen next. That's all magic is. It's just the thing that wants to happen next, the next thing that wants to be born, that wants to create. So when you create, it makes sense that you feel most alive, never lonely. never anxious. You're not just making something. You're sinking with the deepest rhythm of the universe. You're remembering what you're made of. So when I create, I'm in that energy field, which means that I am part of and one with the infinite universal creation. And that's why creativity is such an essential part of our experience here on Earth. There's a lot of other stuff we're here to learn too. We're here to learn how to love and be loved. We're here to learn how to love through pain. You're going to have

to experience loss and death, justice and injustice and love. And hey, I mean, all of these things are happening in this field of consciousness. And it's a wild ride. But if you want to be part of creation, create. Creativity is our birthright. For some reason, there's this mythology. Art is made by these geniuses who specialize in art. But that's not true. People who make art are ordinary people. and we can all do it. Now, I can't say, you know, we can all make the Mona Lisa. If we practice whatever the thing is that we want to create, we will get better and better at creating that thing.

We could become the best version of ourselves doing that. And Martha Beck says this connection to creativity does not need to be done with massive endeavors. Even small acts of creativity can bring you to this place. The smaller the better. And if you just go out and start weaving your garden and imagining what's going to grow them, and putting your body in positions where it's interacting with the creation of something alive,

those things will take you right into the place of creative imagination and the mystery. And so, if ideas really do have a will of their own, if they move through the world like living things, searching for the right person to bring them to, that makes you wonder what else might be moving through us, and what if everything we've talked about today isn't just true for ideas, but for abilities? next time we explore the world of savants. People who seem to have access to extraordinary skills or information they never learned.

Like musicians who can play back a symphony after hearing it once, or artists who can draw a city skyline from memory after a single helicopter ride. Are they simply born different? Or are they tapping into something larger, a collective field of memory or knowledge that's available to all of us if we just knew how to tune in? If you want to go deeper, ask me anything, or get ad-free episodes, subscribe at the telepathy tapes.

or tap the supercast link in the show notes. It takes a village to make this podcast, and I want to thank our producers, Jesse Steed, Jill Pachasnik, and Catherine Ellis. Original music is by Rachel Cantu. Mix and mastering is by Michael Rubino. Original artwork is by Ben Kandora Design. Our executive assistant is Selena Kennedy. And I'm Kai Dickens, your executive producer, writer, and host.