I see that those who talk about how to develope telepathic ability zero in on how one might send a telepathic message but never on how to receive such a message. It is almost like they insinuate that telepathy works more like email message than the telephone message. If it worked like telephone, then both sender and the receiver should be engaged at the same time. This then is the issue that I find it overlooked when telepathy is considerd. They talk about 'the sender getting prepared to send telepathic message', but they don't talk of the receiver.
If telepathy work like email, there should still be the issue of 'how to receive one', much like 'opening email address', or something like that. If messages can come to your brain without you intentionally 'receiving' them much like the way you might intentionally 'send' them, then I dont see why the same is never true for sending! If this is the case, then the whole 'telepathy' thing should boil down to 'trying to identify telepathic messages'. That is to say everyone is as good as any other person when it comes to sending or receiving telepathic messages, but not everyone is as good, when it comes to recognizing them to be such. Perhaps we mistake telepathic messages with our own thoughts.
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But what comes to your mind without any intention or background may not be yours.
"How did I come up with this?"
Many people have probably experienced something like this.
Photos and images we receive from someone also contain invisible information. We probably receive telepathic messages from these too!