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There is a moment in Suzanne Simon’s story that lands like a stone dropped into still water. She is describing what an energy worker witnessed when she travelled, in her own awareness, to the place her son calls “the hill.” Karai, a non-speaking young man who had spent twenty years in apparent silence, was not alone there. He was leading. The healer described millions of souls sprouting wings and rising behind him, and she put a number to it that has since become something of a signature in this circle: thirty-one million, all following Karai.
You can take that literally or you can take it as metaphor. Either way, it points at something worth sitting with. What if some of the people we have spent decades underestimating are doing work we have no instruments to measure?
The boy who spelled before he could speak
Karai was born in Turkey to a fashion designer mother who was, by her own account, running a label that sold through Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman. He met his milestones early. He walked on his first birthday. Then, somewhere around thirteen months, his mother noticed something during an ordinary bath. He recited the alphabet forward, then backward, then upside down, then from the middle outward. Soon he was arranging puzzle letters on the carpet to spell out words like “Museum of Natural History.”
And then the regression came. He lost speech. He became aggressive and severely sensory-dysregulated, screaming in water he had once loved. The diagnosis arrived in stages until it settled into classic autism. What followed was the long, exhausting odyssey familiar to so many families: the closing of a business, a move from Turkey to New York, specialised schools, sleepless months, a cocktail of medications that worked for fifteen years and then stopped working.
What makes Karai’s story resonate beyond the particulars is the gap it exposes. Here was a child who clearly understood letters and language at thirteen months, yet for two decades he had almost no way to show the world what was happening inside him. That gap has a name in the non-speaking community, and understanding it changes everything.
Apraxia, and the long misreading of intelligence
The reason Karai could not speak was never a reason he could not think. The condition at the centre of this is whole-body apraxia, a neurological disconnect in which the brain forms an intention but the body cannot reliably carry it out. As the International Association for Spelling as Communication explains, the brain tells the body what to do and the body simply cannot execute the plan, which is why so many non-speakers appear not to understand instructions when in fact comprehension was never the issue.
This is the quiet tragedy underneath a great deal of autism care. Nearly every test we use to measure intelligence depends on a motor output: speaking, writing, pointing, typing. For someone whose motor system will not cooperate, those tests measure the broken bridge rather than the mind on the far side of it. The practitioners who work with non-speakers therefore begin from a single radical premise, the presumption of competence, which holds that everyone can and wants to learn, and that the absence of speech says nothing about the presence of thought.
For Karai, the bridge came in the form of spelling. After roughly twenty years of silence, he sat down with a communication partner named Matthew and, within his first sessions, began to spell. Within two weeks he was writing eloquent paragraphs, telling his mother how much he appreciated that she never gave up on him. His father, watching a session, heard him spell out his relief that people could finally see how intelligent he was. Karai’s recurring plea to his mother was simple and heartbreaking: tell them how smart I feel.
Evidence you cannot quite explain away
Skeptics have plenty to say about spelling-based communication, and the methods remain contested in mainstream circles. But Suzanne offers a set of episodes that are hard to file neatly under “facilitator influence.” A communication partner named Bella arrived one day and Karai immediately spelled out that she should stop trying to reach him telepathically and use her voice, then correctly noted she had been listening to the telepathy tapes in the car on the way over. In later sessions he knew, before being told, about a workplace situation Bella was agonising over, and he named the exact person she had privately decided to confide in.
Then there is the mathematics. For years Suzanne was told her son had no math skills. A friend’s communication partner gave Karai a multiplication problem with two three-digit numbers he could not have rehearsed, and he produced the answer in under half a second. His explanation was disarmingly plain: the number just popped into my head.
These accounts sit inside a larger cultural moment. The phenomenon of non-speakers describing a shared meeting place reappears across the families documented in The Telepathy Tapes, the cinematic podcast series that brought this hidden community to a mass audience. Whatever one concludes about the mechanism, the consistency of the reports across unrelated families is itself the striking data point.
The hill, the school, and the next wave
This is where Karai’s story turns from remarkable to genuinely cosmic. He speaks often of “the hill,” a place he says he visits in sleep and in trance, and he describes it not as a private dream but as a populated, structured realm. Two separate energy workers, who Suzanne says never compared notes, told her the same thing: Karai runs a school on the hill. His friend Michael is described as a teacher and preacher there. And Karai’s own role, in his words relayed through one healer, is to teach souls currently inhabiting autistic bodies how to help humanity ascend.
When Suzanne asked her son directly about consciousness, his answers were brief and luminous. He said souls stay around, that the collective connects easily with friends on the hill, and that he travels there now more than ever, trying to send his mother messages he is not always sure she receives. He told her he has lived many times, that he remembers the faces, that in one life he served in the military across different wars and drowned in Italy.
You do not have to accept any of this as literal fact to feel its pull. The vision being articulated here echoes ideas that consciousness researchers and contemplatives have circled for a long time, the notion that awareness might be primary rather than produced by the brain. Serious scientists now openly debate whether consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality rather than a late accident of neurons, and the lived testimony of non-speakers like Karai arrives as an unexpected voice in that conversation.
What the message asks of us
The throughline in Suzanne’s account is not the spectacle. It is the dignity. The healer who works with Karai frames her own emerging mission as helping people remember a capacity for connection she believes we all share, the idea that telepathy is something humans are designed for and have largely forgotten. Whether or not that lands for you, the practical invitation underneath it is one this site returns to often: presume competence, in everyone, until proven otherwise. We have explored related ground in our writing on interspecies and intuitive connection, and the underlying principle is the same. Awareness may run far deeper, and far wider, than our instruments admit.
What Karai keeps asking for is not belief in the supernatural. It is to be seen as intelligent, competent, and worth listening to. If thirty-one million souls really are rising behind him toward some next chapter of human becoming, then the first step toward joining them costs nothing and asks everything. Stay kind. Stay curious. And hold open the possibility that the people we have been talking past have been trying to reach us all along.
