Can Elephants Hear Our Prayers ?

Aristotle once said the elephant is "the beast which passeth all others in wit and mind,"according to Wikipedia. They're one of the few creatures that recognizes itself in a mirror. We knew they were highly intelligent and social. But there's a lot more to learn about elephants. For example, they are one of the only animals whose brains share a certain type of nerve cell with humans and whales, a very long type of neuron that some associate with language skills.

And just in the last few years, an animal researcher named Katy Payne, who also studied the songs of great whales, observed from watching elephants at the zoo, that in there is a lot more going on with elephants than we had recognized.  We knew they heard things with their ears; that was obvious.  But Payne also saw elephants carefully positioning three feet while lifting the fourth, and sometimes laying their trunk on the ground as well.  From this she discovered, that in addition to hearing with their ears, they also hear with their drum-like feet and their sensitive trunk (containing from 40,000 to 100,000 muscles just in the trunk alone), and communicate with each other in a subsonic range that we knew nothing about.  They listen in this range of sound, outside our own hearing, using their feet and trunk.  This type of sound can carry through the ground up to 10 kilometers, so even distant elephants can still be in close communication. Yet people standing alongside the elephants have no idea this whole conversation is taking place in the ground beneath their feet.

Last night I read a blog entry called Creation Begins at Home written by a good friend of the Federated Church, writing as Leanderthal.  He refers the reader to a story by Robert Lanza MD which deals with a rather complicated theory of biocentrism. From what I could grasp of this theory, it has to do with how we can understand the universe, when we're stuck experiencing it with only our limited senses and corresponding beliefs in "what is real."

We see only a tiny spectrum of light, which we casually call "visible light," but that more accurately should be termed "human-visible light," because many other creatures do see outside this narrow spectrum.  Honey bees have receptors for ultraviolet, green, and blue receptors.  They can see ultraviolet light.  And correspondingly, some flowers have designs that are only visible in the ultraviolet spectrum. This flower picture at right shows what we see, compared to what a bee sees.

Invisible communication is all around us.  Apparently even trees are communicating to each other... when one tree is attacked by a pest it may sound an alarm by releasing certain chemical signals that encourage nearby trees to react defensively, even before the pest has reached them.  Larry Gedney writes in Alaska Science forum that it is not clear whether the trees are actively talking or just passively listening, but nonetheless concludes, "...the odd but pleasing possibility that plants can communicate delight[s] the public imagination."

We certainly were unaware that trees were communicating with each other, much like we failed to see that elephants were listening with their feet and trunks, and that bees and flowers had a an entirely hidden communication in the ultraviolet spectrum.  We can't hear it, smell it, or see it, but it is there nonetheless. Numerous examples abound... how about the migratory birds that can sense the earth's magnetic field?

So this leads me to ESP or "extra sensory perception."  Perception of things beyond our normal sensory range. We only sense a tiny fraction of what is going on around us... tiny windows that we peer out through, to the true world.  Apparently the true world is a chaos of vibration-- of vibrating atoms, light particles, sound waves... and we make sense of this by sharply limiting what we experience.

Yet isn't it likely that occasionally we get flashes or brushes of all the other unseen or unheard "goings-on" around us?  That from time to time we are almost able to sense something outside our normal range, but dismiss this sensation outright because of our unfamiliarity or lack of ability to process and decode this information?

Could this be another way to look at prayer? Is prayer really an attempt to recognize, mesh with, listen to... and perhaps even influence another power in the universe that we only are able to occasionally brush against, and rarely able to comprehend or "see" ... but maybe just often enough that we suspect there is something there?  Is it a way of centering and quieting our thoughts to help us become more open and communicative with some other vibration passing in and around us? Is it a communication that can travel unimagined distances, like the elephants listening across a wide savannah?

Who else can hear our prayers?  Whose eyes, ears, feet, or trunks are better developed than ours for this type of communication?  Are the elephants listening?