“To approach telepathy, you start with empathy and crank that up as high as you can. You care about each other. You feel each other’s joy and pain. You make each other laugh, and help each other cry. You work hard at trusting each other, so that it’s safe to dismantle the fortress around your ego. You forgive each other anything that stands between you, and try to bring out each other’s best, you work very hard at hosing all the [junk] out of your head so that it’s clean enough for guests, silencing all the demons in your subconscious so that it’s quiet enough to hear somebody thinking at you, and most of all you finds ways to make that work so much fun that you keep on working. You stick together and love each other and keep on growing.”
--Spider Robinson
The Mick of Time
in “The Callahan Chronicles”
“The Callahan Chronicles” is a collection of Robinson’s science fiction short stories all based around a bar where “shared pain is lessened and shared joy is increased.” Robinson’s stories are some of my favorite writings ever—not because of the sci-fi element, which always fascinates me, of course…..but because the basic message and principles behind his stories are essentially godly--in the same way that J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” and C.S. Lewis’s “Narnia” chronicles are essentially Christian works. I’m not sure what Robinson’s beliefs are—actually, a dim memory of something I read tells me he doesn’t necessarily believe in God. However, just based on the message behind his stories, I can say this: He gets it.
And regarding the quote above: I firmly believe that if we humans could ever figure out how truly to “love one another,” we would accomplish the kind of telepathy Robinson is describing.
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