But tonight, I think I'll get back into my discussion of The Secret Life of Plants.
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When we last talked about the interesting things to be found in The Secret Life of Plants, I said that this time we'd look at some crazy things people got plants to do.
There was Pierre Paul Sauvin who, after hearing Backster on a radio show, decided that if plants would respond to a person's thoughts by moving a recording device, they could be harnessed to move other things. First he hooked up a toy train to change direction (as an impetus for his emotional "broadcast" to the plant he shocked himself,) later he had his plant hooked to open the garage door (using sex as the emotional stimulus this time,) and fly a model plane. He did find that the memory of the stimulus was just as effective as the actual shock (or whatever,) and he also found the process worked better using a plant with which he already had a positive relationship - water and love will do it every time. Plants are so easy.
Sauvin was an ITT engineer, and interested in "alternate" theories of reality. With his engineering skills he was able to construct a monitoring device a hundred times more sensitive than Backster's, with which he hoped to distinguish fine changes in the energy field of the plants. For him, the concept that plants had energy fields similar to those generated by humans was a given, and his interest was to study how the interaction of those fields could be put to use.
Another engineer who duplicated Backster's results was Eldon Byrd, an operations analyst with the Naval Ordnance Laboratory. Byrd believed that the Backster effect was caused by a change in the polarization in the cells of the leaves, though he couldn't explain the mechanism causing the change. One of the things he worked on adapting to the plant response phenomenon was a lie detecting device based on analysis of vocalizations.
Another engineer/philosopher, Dr. Ken Hashimoto in Japan, after working with sensitive voice recording machines for lie detection, reversed the process using his wife's cactus and a sound modulation device, and achieved an electric hum, "varied and pleasant, at times even warm and almost jolly" from the plant. The plant world had given its first speech!
Of course, reports, stories and research such as these have caused reactions from mirth to derision to anger in the establishment. But once someone has seen plants produce measurable reactions to human thoughts, the next questions have to be, if one has any kind of open and curious mind, "why," "how," and "what are we not understanding?"
Many people, Byrd and Hashimoto among them, believe that these kinds of phenomena are pointing the way toward an as yet undiscovered form of energy. As Eldon Byrd put it in an article for Megabrain Report
...not ... electromagnetic energy...but a whole other form of energy which we currently have no instruments to measure....It doesn't take any time for it to propagate from one point in time and space to another because it has nothing to do with time or space. *Bioplasmic fields of energy surrounding each living thing. Instantaneous communication independent of space and time. Information unbound by matter and energy. I wonder if these quirky and almost unknown experiments of wiring plant leaves to recording devices are the first baby steps we're taking on the road to the stars.
Bona Fortuna,
Marlie
* Byrd, Eldon Megabrain Report V.1 n.1
Tompkins, Peter and Bird, Christopher, The Secret Life of Plants. New York, Harper and Rowe. 1973
(By Marlie Graves)
