14. CHAPTER 8. WHY WE SPEAK

Everyone else was telepathic

The Lemurians communicated by telepathy and had no spoken language. Blavatsky gives it plainly: speech came later, as the telepathy began to fade (Blavatsky 1888).

The Atlanteans had both, and the esoteric accounts treat the telepathy as the older and more reliable of the two.

The extraterrestrial races use it as ordinary speech. It is how the channeled material arrives, which makes every session in this book a demonstration of the thing being described.

And we are the exception. Telepathy in us is a fringe phenomenon, tested in laboratories, disputed in journals, and absent from ordinary life. Vocal language is our universal.

Which is what we were bred for

Consider the problem from the position of somebody making a workforce.

A telepathic workforce knows what the overseer is thinking. Deception reaches it and fails. A grievance felt by one is felt by all of them at once. And it cannot be divided, because the thing that divides people is the space between what one knows and what another knows, and telepathy closes that space.

Speech has none of those properties. It is slow, it carries only what the speaker chooses to send, it can be misled, it can be forbidden, and it leaves every person separate from every other.

So a made people that speaks is manageable and a made people that is telepathic is not.

And the sources name what was removed

Blavatsky and Bashar both name the structures: Blavatsky the pineal gland and the pituitary (Blavatsky 1888; Blavatsky, Esoteric Instructions), Bashar the corpus callosum as well, which is the bridge joining the two halves of the brain (Anka, Bashar).

Bashar describes the corpus callosum and the glandular system as where vibrational discernment sits, the sense that connects every living being to every other (Anka, Bashar).

Bashar goes further. The stretches between the genes were scrambled and distortions introduced, so that the system stopped resonating at the frequencies that carry the connection (Anka, Bashar).

So the account is not that telepathy was left out. It is that the apparatus was present and was damaged.

What else went with it

The loss of compassion runs through this book and it has been stated without a mechanism. Telepathy supplies one.

Compassion means feeling what another feels. With an open channel that happens by itself, and it is not a virtue, because there is no choice in it. Cruelty to somebody whose pain arrives in your own body is close to impossible.

Close the channel and the pain of another becomes information, which can be discounted, disbelieved, or simply not received.

Which produces a species able to harm without registering the harm.

And that is the quality this book has already identified as the reason we outlasted everyone: competitive, promiscuous, insensitive to the ground we stand on, and unrestrained.

Every one of those follows from the same closure.

Bred deaf

So the picture is this.

We were made from local stock, in a world of telepathic peoples, by operators who needed something that would work and obey. The apparatus for connection was damaged on purpose, and speech was what remained.

The deafness is the design. Everything we are good at, and everything we have done to this planet and to each other, runs through it.

Did the speech come from birds?

The Egyptians said their language was given to them by Thoth, the god of writing and of speech. In the channeled material he is a blue avian, a bird, and the bird-headed figures on the Egyptian temple walls are described as those beings in their own likeness (James E. Charles, Thoth). So we asked whether our speech came from the birds.

What the genetics says about that

FOXP2 is the gene most closely tied to speech in us. A family in London with a damaged copy was the finding that identified it: their speech develops poorly and their grammar stays broken for life (Lai et al. 2001).

The same gene runs birdsong. Damage it in a young songbird and the bird fails to learn its song (Haesler et al. 2007).

And the capacity itself is rare. Vocal learning, meaning the ability to hear a sound and reproduce it, belongs to humans, songbirds, parrots, hummingbirds, and a few whales, dolphins and bats (Jarvis 2004). Our own closest relatives lack it. A chimpanzee raised among speaking people stays silent.

So the ability sits in us and in the birds, and skips almost everything in between, including the animals we are most closely related to.

And the brains match. A study in Science in 2014 compared which genes are switched on in the vocal-learning parts of a human brain and a songbird brain. Dozens of the same genes, turned on in the same pattern, in two lineages that parted company three hundred million years ago (Pfenning et al. 2014).

The accepted explanation is convergence: the same solution arrived at twice, independently, because the problem is the same. That happens, and eyes are the usual example.

What makes this case different is the precision. Convergence usually produces the same function by different means. Here it produces the same function by the same means, gene for gene.

We checked

The test was simple in principle. The apes are our closest relatives, and they do not speak. If our speech genes had come from birds, our versions of those genes would look like the bird versions and differ from the ape versions.

We took fifty-eight genes tied to speech and vocal learning, FOXP2 among them, and compared the human version of each with the versions in the chimpanzee and the other apes, and in three songbirds. Every one of them looked like the ape version. The silent apes carry the same speech genes we do, with only small differences.

Then we searched the whole human genome for stretches of bird DNA missing from the apes, and found none.

So the birds are ruled out as the source of our speech. The test leaves open whether the small changes that made those genes work for speech arose by natural evolution or were introduced by genetic engineering.