Since the 1960s there have been experiments in which researchers have tried to prove whether plants are aware of their environment or not. Actually, the awareness of thinking and recognizing plants is much older. It would fit in with the mindset of the alchemists, who were also searching for “mandragora”, plants that have roots like little men and scream terribly when they are pulled out. The story was taken up in Harry Potter. And today you can buy a small mandragora in a bottle. The Koreans cultivate it en masse and pay thousands of euros for special pieces: ginseng!
No wonder mandragora was so hard to come by in the Middle Ages. Korea was not even known and 9000 km away! Ginseng is said to contain an essence that also cleanses our body energetically and thus prolongs our life.
Then there were the European mandrakes, which were eventually given the name mandragora in order to have something to hand. Mandrakes contain an alkaloid and can therefore be used as a drug plant. However, nothing usable can be found about the drug effect.
In the case of drug plants, the plants also “speak” to people through their drugs. For shamans and witches, they are therefore indispensable aids, if not partners.
The Bruchos (medicine men) of Central America, for example, speak of the “god Mescalito”, who animates all peyote cacti and “relentlessly leads all people who chew them to self-knowledge”. For this reason, mescaline has probably never become a party drug.
James Joyce wrote 100 years ago in one of his plays that “the carrots scream when a hare appears and wants to eat them”. So he knew it too.
In 1974 I did some research in this direction and found some reports from the USA. Various researchers who were involved in PSI research came to convincing conclusions. Unfortunately, the original reports from libraries have been lost to me over the decades. I will briefly summarize a few reports here.
Several researchers (including FBI agent Cleve Baxster) came up with the idea of attaching lie detectors to large plants, such as a rubber tree. The tree reacted happily when its owner came into the room, because he gave it water and fertilizer. It was cared for and looked after.
Then a researcher came up with the following idea: he asked a colleague to burn a leaf on the rubber tree with a lighter. The tree naturally screamed in pain and horror! The lie detector’s reactions were clear. In the period that followed, sometimes only the “good owner” or only the “evil destroyer” entered the room. The rubber tree recognized very precisely which person entered the room and its reactions fluctuated between panic and joy. Such experiments have been carried out and confirmed by various parapsychological institutes. One of the reports was called “Do plants feel emotions?”, see also the references in “PSI” by Oestrander/Schroeder 1975
It is not clear to researchers how plants do this, as they have no nerves and no brain in our sense, but there is no doubt that they can perceive their environment in a very differentiated way and also over greater distances. In film reports, it has been repeatedly observed and reported that the tendrils of climbing plants, for example, detach themselves very precisely from a branch on which they have grown upwards at a suitable point and continue to grow in the direction where another branch of another tree is growing within an acceptable range. If their stability does not allow them to reach the other branch, they will form a 2nd and 3rd tendril. The 3 tendrils now twine around each other, reinforcing each other and their reach, and soon the new tree is reached. Use this method to conquer huge areas.
But what kind of perception do they use to “see” the new branch at a distance of perhaps one meter or more?
There have also been very few reports on this topic on TV. Anyone who wants to can look into it. The SZ report is therefore interesting because it takes up an important topic in our understanding of nature and substantiates it with new evidence. We cannot ignore the fact that plants also think, have feelings and react to their environment in a differentiated way.
This puts the philosophy of vegans in a different light. It is of course desirable if we treat all other living beings with respect and really only take what we need from nature. But obviously living, dying and eating is just the normal course of our lives, and it’s just a question of who we kill to feed ourselves. We can’t get around it. Do we prefer to eat plants because we can’t hear them scream, or animals that can scream on our wavelength? Is a chicken from a chicken farm more ethically valuable than a nice head of cabbage from the field, or does it just cluck louder? Isn’t a sequoia tree with its 1000 years of experience perhaps more valuable than the mayfly “human”? It is worth thinking about this.
Perhaps my small contribution can inspire you to see everything in everything. Everything is alive! Even the crystals that we take from the earth and the rock, polish up and enjoy. Horus once said that crystals are “feelings of higher beings”.
I would like to conclude these reflections with a short ZEN poem that I wrote in 1988, when I was also dealing with this subject.
Living
Dying
Coming to rest between the two
I am
dha 1988
Article recommendation from the Süddeutsche Zeitung: Are plants intelligent? Can plants solve problems? http://www.sz.de/1.2479997
