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. Even the shamans of prehistoric times talked to their plants. How else could they know what they were good for?
The alchemists were looking for “mandragora”, plants that have roots like little men and that scream horribly (!) when they are clumsily pulled out. The mystical story was taken up in Harry Potter. And today you can buy a small mandragora in a bottle (see below). 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 cleanses our body energetically and thus prolongs our life.
Incidentally, the name Man-Drago-Ra is derived from Man (human), Drago (dragon) and Ra (sun god), which means something like “little dragon man” (who lives in the earth) and carries the power of the sun god Ra within him. A fitting logic, because the plants really do get their energy from the sun god Ra and store the resulting reserves in their roots. The English name is “mandrake”.
The spirit of a plant lives in the rootstock and not in the herb above it. Rudolf Steiner pointed out as early as 1910 that the thinking center and the reproductive organs are located at opposite ends of the body in all living beings. In humans and animals, the more or less thinking heads and brains are at the “front or top” and the sexual organs are at the “bottom or back”. Since plants all stretch their sexual organs towards the sun and the sky, their thinking center must therefore be located in the rootstock, usually directly in a tuber or a stem extension close to the earth’s surface.
So you could say, “My love! May I present you with a fresh bouquet of sexual organs from my red roses?” (You know what I’m trying to say here?)
This is also the reason why it is of little value to tear off only the upper part of a weed. As long as the rhizome and the often existing stem thickening remain just below the soil surface, the plant will sprout again.
Then there were the European mandrakes in the Middle Ages, which were eventually given the name mandragora in order to have something to hand. Mandrakes contain alkaloids and can therefore be used as a drug plant. However, its use is tricky, difficult to dose and associated with severe side effects. (For details see link below)
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.
In 1848, the German psychologist Gustav Theodor Fechner was probably the first researcher in modern times to demonstrate plant reactions using devices.
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 results here.
Several researchers (including FBI man 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 following period, 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 in various parapsychological institutes. One of the reports was called “Do plants feel emotions?”.
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 a new tree is growing within an acceptable range. If their stability does not allow them to reach the new 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. With this method you can conquer huge areas.
But what kind of perception do they use to “see” the new branch at a distance of perhaps one meter? For me, there is only one explanation. Scientists are once again denying the existence of the spirit that animates and controls every living being. The spirit, in turn, has something to do with energy, with magnetism. All living cells have their own small magnetic fields and communicate with each other using infrared signals. It is therefore quite obvious that the “spirit” of a plant can recognize who is entering a room and with what intentions. They can “read” the spiritual signatures and react to them. Likewise, they can recognize the presence of another tree and even a dead fence post in order to grow in its direction and climb up to the light.
It is precisely this “considered action” that is based on a “primary perception”, and if we accept the existence of an animating, thinking and acting mind, everything is quite easy. However, the narrow-mindedness of most scientists is frightening.
There have been positive reports on this topic on TV from time to time. Anyone who wants to can look into it. The SZ report (see below) is interesting because it takes up an important topic in our understanding of nature and underpins it with new evidence. We cannot avoid the fact that plants also think, have feelings and react in a differentiated way to their environment. We are just used to dealing with them more ruthlessly than with animals.
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 beautiful head of cabbage from the field? Isn’t a sequoia tree with its 1000 years of experience perhaps more valuable than the mayfly “human”? It is worth thinking about this.
The convinced vegetarian George Bernard Shaw visited the Bengali researcher Jagadish Chandra Bose in 1900 and was dismayed to see and hear how the researcher was able to make the death throes of a cabbage in a cooking pot audible in his laboratory. The cabbage screamed until it was dead.
Perhaps my report can inspire you to see everything in everything. Everything is alive!
The crystals that we take from the earth and the rock, polish up and enjoy also live in their own way. 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
