Plants have intelligence and are feeling beings!

5.6.2015

Autor: D. Harald Alke

A standpoint, not an encyclopedia entry. A spiritual reflection by D. Harald Alke. Background knowledge: encyclopedia entry Consciousness and mind.

This article renders a personal, spiritually shaped view. The experiments and readings described here are meant in a worldview-based way and are not to be understood as assured scientific facts.

Since the 1960s of the 20th century there have been experiments in which researchers wanted to prove whether plants perceive their surroundings or not. Actually, the awareness of thinking and recognising plants is far older still. Already the shamans of prehistory spoke with their plants. How else were they to learn what they are good for?

The alchemists were on the search for “mandragora”, plants that have roots like little men, and that scream horribly (!) when one pulls them out clumsily. In Harry Potter the mystical story has been taken up. And today you can buy yourself a little mandragora in a bottle (see below). The Koreans cultivate it in masses and pay for special specimens thousands of euros: ginseng!

No wonder that mandragora was so hard to come by in the Middle Ages. Korea was not even known and 9,000 km away! Ginseng is said to contain an essence that cleanses our body energetically and thereby lengthens our life.

The name Man-Drago-Ra derives, incidentally, from Man (human), Drago (dragon) and Ra (sun-god); it means as much as “little dragon-human” (who dwells in the earth) and carries the power of the sun-god Ra within itself. A fitting logic, for the plants really do fetch the energy from the sun-god Ra and store the reserves thus gained in their roots. The English name is “mandrake”.

The mind of a plant indeed dwells in the rootstock, and not, say, in the herbage above it. Rudolf Steiner pointed out, already around 1910, that the thinking-centre and the reproductive organs, with all living beings, are located at the opposite ends of the respective body. With humans and animals, the more or less thinking heads and brains are “in front or above”, and the sexual organs are to be found “below or behind”. Since the plants, one and all, stretch their sexual organs towards the sun and up into the sky, their thinking-centre must therefore be located in the rootstock, mostly directly in a tuber or a stem-widening close under the earth’s surface.

So one could put it thus: “My dearest! May I hand you a fresh bunch of sexual organs from my red roses?” (You already know what I want to signal with that?)

That is also the reason why it has little value to tear only the upper part of the shrub off a weed. As long as the rootstock and the often-present stem-thickening close under the earth’s surface remain in, the plant will sprout again.

Then, in the Middle Ages, there were still the European mandrakes (Alraunen), to which one finally assigned the name mandragora, in order to have something in hand. Mandrakes contain alkaloids, and can thus be used as a drug-plant. However, the application is delicate, hard to dose and connected with heavy side-effects. (Details see the link below.)

In the handed-down shamanic tradition, the drug-plants “speak” with humans through their active substances; for shamans and witches they counted as indispensable aids, if not even as partners. That is a cultural-historical and worldview-based account – no application recommendation; such plants are delicate and can be dangerous.

The Bruchos (medicine men) of Central America speak, for example, of the “god Mescalito”, who ensouls all peyote cacti and “leads mercilessly to self-knowledge” all people who chew them. For this reason mescaline has probably never become a party-drug.

The German psychologist Gustav Theodor Fechner was, in 1848, presumably the 1st researcher of the modern age who could prove plant-reactions by means of instruments.

James Joyce wrote, 100 years ago, in one of his pieces, that “the carrots scream when a hare appears and wants to eat them”. So he knew it too.

In 1974 I researched in this direction and found some reports from the USA. Various researchers who occupied themselves with PSI research came to convincing results. Unfortunately, the original reports from libraries have been lost to me in the course of the decades. I want to summarise here briefly a few results.

Several researchers (among others the FBI man Cleve Baxter) came upon the idea of connecting lie-detectors to large plants, e.g. to a rubber tree. The tree reacted joyfully when its owner entered the room, for from him it got water and fertiliser. It was tended and cared for.

Then a researcher came upon the following idea: he prompted a colleague to singe a leaf of the rubber tree with a lighter. The tree screamed, of course, with pain and with horror! The reactions of the lie-detector were unambiguous. In the time that followed, sometimes only the “good owner”, or only the “evil destroyer”, entered the room. The rubber tree recognised very precisely which human entered the room, and its reactions wavered between panic and joy. Such experiments were carried out in various parapsychological institutes and confirmed. One of the reports was called “Do plants feel emotions?” (compare also the source references in “PSI” by Ostrander/Schroeder, 1975).

How the plants do that is not clear to the researchers, since they have no nerves and no brain in our sense, yet without doubt they can perceive their surroundings very differentiatedly and also over greater distances.

In film reports it was again and again observed and reported that, e.g., the tendrils of climbing plants detach very precisely, at a suitable spot, from a branch up which they have grown, and grow on in the direction where, within acceptable reach, another branch grows from a new tree. If their stability does not allow them to reach the new branch, they form a 2nd and 3rd tendril. The 3 tendrils now wind around one another, strengthen themselves and their reach, and soon the new tree is reached. With this method they conquer enormous areas.

Only with what kind of perception do they “see” the new branch at perhaps a metre’s distance? For me there is only one explanation for this. The scientists once again deny the existence of the mind that animates and steers every living being. The mind, in turn, has something to do with energy, with magnetism. All living cells have their own small magnetic fields and communicate among themselves with infrared signals. Quite obviously, then, “the mind” of a plant can recognise who enters a room and with what intentions. They can “read” the mental signatures and react to them. Likewise they can recognise the presence of another tree and even of a dead fence-post, in order to grow in its direction and climb up it towards the light.

Precisely this “considered action” rests on a “primary perception”, and if we accept the existence of an animating, thinking and acting mind, everything is quite easy. The narrow-mindedness of most scientists, however, is frightening.

On this theme, positive reports have come on TV now and then. Whoever wishes can occupy themselves with it. The report of the SZ (see below) is interesting because it takes up an important theme in the understanding of nature and underpins it with new evidence. We cannot get past the fact that plants too think, have feelings and react differentiatedly to their surroundings. We are only accustomed to dealing with them more inconsiderately than with animals.

That casts the philosophy of the vegans in a different light. It is, of course, desirable if we treat all other living beings with respect and really take from nature only what we need. But quite obviously, living, dying and nutrition are simply the normal course of our life, and it is only the question of whom we kill in order to nourish ourselves. We cannot get past it. Do we rather eat plants because we cannot hear their screaming, or also animals that can scream on our wavelength? Is a chicken from a chicken-farm ethically more valuable than a beautiful head of cabbage from the field? Is a giant sequoia with its 1,000 years of experience not perhaps more valuable than the mayfly “human”? It is worth reflecting on it.

The convinced vegetarian George Bernard Shaw visited, in 1900, the Bengali researcher Jagadish Chandra Bose and had to watch and hear, dismayed, how the researcher, in his laboratory, could make the death-struggle of a head of cabbage in a cooking pot acoustically perceptible. The cabbage screamed until it was dead.

My report can perhaps prompt you to see everything in everything. Everything lives!

The crystals too, which we fetch from the earth and the rock, polish up and take delight in, live in their own way. Horus once said that the crystals “are feelings of higher beings”.

I would like to close these reflections with a little Zen poem that I composed in 1988, when I too occupied myself with this theme.

Living
Dying
Between the two come to rest
Am I

© dha 1988

Source references

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_perception_%28paranormal%29
http://www.viewzone.com/plants.html
http://www.sz.de/1.2479997