Tuesday, March 19, 2024

the Beautiful Necessity

 






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Light the fire.

This is now. Now is
all there is. Don't wait for Then;
strike the spark, light the fire.

Sit at the Beloved's table,
feast with gusto, drink your fill

then dance
the way branches
of jasmine and cypress
dance in a spring wind.

The green earth
is your cloth;
tailor your robe
with dignity and grace.


—Rumi


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Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity, which secures that all is made of one piece; that plaintiff and defendant, friend and enemy, animal and planet, food and eater, are of one kind. 

In astronomy is vast space, but no foreign system; in geology, vast time, but the same laws as to-day. 

Why should we be afraid of Nature, which is no other than “philosophy and theology embodied”? Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements, we who are made up of the same elements? 

Let us build to the Beautiful Necessity, which makes man brave in believing that he cannot shun a danger that is appointed, nor incur one that is not;

to the Necessity which rudely or softly educates him to the perception that there are no contingencies;

that Law rules throughout existence, a Law which is not intelligent but intelligence, — not personal nor impersonal — it disdains words and passes understanding; 

it dissolves persons; it vivifies nature; 
yet solicits the pure in heart to draw on all its omnipotence.


—Ralph Waldo Emerson




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Monday, March 18, 2024

a love letter







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Within a circle of one meter 
You sit, pray and sing.
Within a shelter ten meters large
You sleep well, rain sounds a lullaby.

Within a field a hundred meters large
Grow rice and raise goats.

Within a valley a thousand meters large
Gather firewood, water, wild vegetables and Amanitas.

Within a forest ten kilometers large
Play with raccoons, hawks, poison snakes and butterflies.

Mountainous country Shinano
A hundred kilometers large
Where someone lives leisurely, they say.

Within a circle ten thousand kilometers large
Walking somewhere on the earth.

Within a circle one hundred thousand kilometers large
Swimming in the sea of shooting stars.

Within a circle a million kilometers large
Upon the spaced-out yellow mustard blossoms
The moon in the east, the sun in the west.

Within a circle ten billion kilometers large
Pop far out of the solar system mandala.

Within a circle ten thousand light years large
The Galaxy full blooming in summer.

Within a circle one billion light years large
Andromeda is melting away into snowing cherry flowers. 
Now within a circle ten billion light years large
All thoughts of time, space are burnt away.

There again you sit, pray and sing.


—Nanao Sakaki



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sudden rightnesses, wholly containing the mind








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All fluid activities are in resonance.

They mutualize and inform each other.

The fluid inside this biosphere called Earth
and the fluids of our bodies are in constant rapport.


—Emilie Conrad


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Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.
And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.


—T.S. Eliot

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The poem of the mind in the act of finding

What will suffice. It has not always had

To find: the scene was set; it repeated what

Was in the script.

Then the theatre was changed

To something else. Its past was a souvenir.


It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.

It has to face the men of the time and to meet

The women of the time. It has to think about war

And it has to find what will suffice. It has

To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage

And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and

With meditation, speak words that in the ear,

In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,

Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound

Of which, an invisible audience listens,

Not to the play, but to itself, expressed

In an emotion as of two people, as of two

Emotions becoming one. The actor is

A metaphysician in the dark, twanging

An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives

Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly

Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,

Beyond which it has no will to rise.

It must

Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may

Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman

Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.


—Wallace Stevens
Of Modern Poetry
(begs to be spoken


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the branch might seem like the fruit’s origin: in fact, the branch exists because of the fruit —Rumi

 











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Prayer is something that happens to you (Romans 8:26-27), much more than anything you privately do. It is an allowing of the Big Self more than an assertion of the small self. Eventually you will find yourself preferring to say, “Prayer happened, and I was there” more than “I prayed today.” All you know is that you are being led, being guided, being loved, being used, being prayed through—and you are no longer in the driver’s seat.

God stops being an object of attention like any other object in the world, and becomes at some level your own “I am.” You start knowing through, with, and in Somebody Else. 
Your little “I Am” becomes “We Are.” 
Please trust me on this. It might be the most important thing I could tell you.


—Fr. Richard Rohr
The Naked Now


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To be fully ourselves it is in the opposite direction, in the direction of convergence with all the rest, that we must advance—towards the ‘other.’ 

The peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together. There is no mind without synthesis. The same holds good from top to bottom.
 
The true ego grows in inverse proportion to ‘egoism.’ Like the Omega which attracts it, the element only becomes personal when it universalises itself.


—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The Phenomenon of Man



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Sunday, March 17, 2024

there’s music in us







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Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there's music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.

The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.

What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.

Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.


—Jack Gilbert, 1925 - 2012
Horses at Midnight Without a Moon 



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eyes of the heart

   

 
 
 


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For one who sees with the eyes of the heart, rather than the senses, the world looks different; the blades of grass, the song of the birds, the drops of dew, all are seen to be none other than the One Life that surrounds us in every moment. 
They see the One in every creature and every creature in the One… they see everything with an equal eye.


—Bhagavad Gita


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Ether, air, fire, water, earth, planets, all creatures, directions, trees and plants, rivers and seas, they are all organs of God’s body. 
Remembering this a devotee respects all species.


—The Srimad Bhagavatam (2.2.41)




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earth(lings

  

 







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We come into being in and through the Earth.
Simply put, we are Earthlings.

The Earth is our origin, our nourishment,
our educator, our healer, our fulfillment.

At its core, even our spirituality is Earth derived.
The human and the Earth are totally implicated,
each in the other.

If there is no spirituality in the Earth,
then there is no spirituality in ourselves.


—Thomas Berry


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I
Do not

Want to step so quickly
Over a beautiful line on God's palm
As I move through the earth's
Marketplace
Today.

I do not want to touch any object in this world
Without my eyes testifying to the truth
That everything is
My Beloved.

Something has happened
To my understanding of existence
That now makes my heart always full of wonder
And kindness.

I do not
Want to step so quickly
Over this sacred place on God's body
That is right beneath your
Own foot

As I
Dance with
Precious life
Today.


—Hafiz
Daniel Ladinsky version



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Saturday, March 16, 2024

drama of the visible and the invisible




Tree of Knowledge, 1913
Hilma af Klint, Swedish 




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There slumbers in every human being faculties by means of which he can acquire for himself a knowledge of higher worlds. Mystics, Gnostics, Theosophists — all speak of a world of soul and spirit which for them is just as real as the world we see with our physical eyes and touch with our physical hands.

[...] Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of perception, as senses for bodily processes, so does a man develop in himself soul and spiritual organs of perception through which the soul and spiritual worlds are opened to him.

For those who do not have such higher senses, these worlds are dark and silent, just as the bodily world is dark and silent for a being without eyes and ears.


―Rudolf Steiner





It is clear that 'higher' always means and implies 'more inner,' 'more interior', 'deeper', 'more intimate'; while 'lower' implies 'more outer', 'more external', 'shallower', 'less intimate' ... the more interior a thing is, the less visible it is likely to be. 

The progression from visibility to invisibility is just another facet of the great hierarchy of Levels of Being. We do not understand that life, before all other definitions of it, is a drama of the visible and the invisible.

Our ordinary mind always tried to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but this is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.


―E.F. Schumacher
A Guide for the Perplexed, excerpts

this road is the heart opening —Mirabai

   





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To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. 
To know the dark, go dark. 
Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.


—Wendell Berry


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The window is the absence of the wall, and it gives air and light because it is empty. Be empty of all mental content, of all imagination and effort, and the very absence of obstacles will cause reality to rush in.

All you need is to understand that you are the source of reality, that you give reality instead of getting it, that you need no support and no confirmation. 

Things are as they are because you accept them as they are. Stop accepting them and they will dissolve.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj



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you know ...


 




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The world only exists in your eyes … 

You can make it as big or as small as you want. 


—F. Scott Fitzgerald 




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Friday, March 15, 2024

adaequatio







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Knowledge comes about insofar as the object known is within the knower.


—St. Thomas Aquinas



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The wild mind of the planet blows through us all, ensconced as we are in the depths of this elusive medium. However, although it is our common element, every one of us experiences it differently. No two bodies or beings ever inhabit this big awareness from precisely the same angle, or with the same sensory organization and style.

Since the body is precisely our interface and exchange with the field of awareness, a praying mantis’s experience of mind is as weirdly different from mine as its spindly body is different from mine; and the dreaming of an aspen grove is as different from mine and the mantis’s as its own fleshly interchange with the medium is different from ours.

It is our bodies that participate in awareness.


—David Abram
Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology



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Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.

Never did the eye see the sun unless it has first become sunlike, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.


—Plotinus


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This is the Great Truth of “adaequatio” (adequateness), which defines knowledge as adequatio et rei et intellectus—the understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known.

[] “As above, so below’ the ancients used to say: to the world outside us there corresponds, in some fashion, a world inside us.


—E.F. Schumacher
A Guide for the Perplexed



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know(ledge

  





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When we say that the world is knowable, i.e. that knowledge as such exists, we state through this fact itself the tenet of the essential unity of the world or its knowability. We declare that the world is not a mosaic, where a plurality of worlds which are essentially strangers to one another are fitted together, but that it is an organism - all of whose parts are governed by the same principle, revealing it and allowing reduction to it. 

The relationship of everything and of all beings is the conditio sine qua non of their knowability.


—Anonymous (Valentin Tomberg?)
Meditations on the Tarot



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the shapes of all things



Lotta at Hof Butenland Farm Sanctuary




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... the wind has its reasons. We just don't notice as we go about our lives. But then, at some point, we are made to notice. The wind envelops you with a certain purpose in mind, and it rocks you. 
The wind knows everything that's inside you. 
And not just the wind. Everything, including a stone. They all know us very well. From top to bottom. 
It only occurs to us at certain times. And all we can do is go with those things. As we take them in, we survive, and deepen.


—Haruki Murakami
Hear the Wind Sing, excerpt



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... while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a manner the shapes of all things as they must live together like one being.
 
―Black Elk,
Black Elk Speaks


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Thursday, March 14, 2024

thou art that

 






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A knower of the Truth
travels without leaving a trace
speaks without causing harm
gives without keeping an account

The door he shuts, though having no lock,
cannot be opened
The knot he ties, though using no cord,
cannot be undone

If you think otherwise,
despite your knowledge, you have blundered


—Lao Tzu
Tao Te Ching



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You know that you are. 

Don’t burden yourself with names, just be. 

Any name or shape you give yourself obscures your real nature.


—Sri Nisargadatta





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the summons

   





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Listen.

In the silence
between your heartbeats
bides a summons.
Do you hear it?


Name it if you must,
or leave it forever nameless,
but why pretend it is not there?


Leave that which is not,
but appears to be.
Seek that which is,
but is not apparent.



—Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī




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bee(ing






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There is a being wonderful, perfect; It existed before heaven and earth. How quiet it is! How spiritual it is! 
It stands alone and it does not change; It moves, but does not on that account suffer. All life comes from it, yet it does not demand to be Lord. 
I do not know its name, so I call it Tao, the Way, 
And I rejoice in its power.


—Tao Te Ching
25th Chapter

 

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God expects but one thing of you, and that is that you should come out of yourself in so far as you are a created being and let God be God in you.
 

Meister Eckhart








Wednesday, March 13, 2024

the role - if any - of the brain in con­sciousness







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Cleve Backster could name the moment the focus of his life changed forever, from lie detection to plant intelligence: early in the morning on February 2, 1966, at 13 minutes, 55 seconds of chart time for a polygraph he was administering. He had threatened the subject’s well-being in hopes of triggering a response. The subject had responded electrochemically to this threat. The subject was a plant.

Almost 20 years ago I interviewed Cleve Backster about plant intelli­gence. No, he wasn’t a botanist. He was one of the world’s experts on the use of polygraphs, or lie detectors. I know that sounds like an odd con­nection, but listen to his story, and the connection will become clear. Just after World War II he was a CIA interrogation specialist, and founded The Agency’s polygraph school. In 1960 he left the CIA and formed the Backster School of Lie Detection, to instruct police officers. This school is the longest running polygraph school in existence.

Backster could name the moment the focus of his life changed for­ever, from lie detection to plant intelligence: early in the morning on February 2, 1966, at 13 minutes, 55 seconds of chart time for a polygraph he was administering. He had threatened the subject’s well-being in hopes of triggering a response. The subject had responded electrochemically to this threat. The subject was a plant.

Here’s his story: “I wasn’t particularly into plants, but there was a going-out-of-business sale at a florist on the ground floor of the building, and the secretary bought a couple of plants for the office: a rubber plant, and this dracaena cane. I had done a saturation watering — putting them under the faucet until water ran out the bottom of the pots — and was curious to see how long it would take the moisture to get to the top. I was especially interested in the dracaena, because the water had to climb a long trunk, and then to the end of long leaves. I thought if I put the galvanic-skin-response detector of the polygraph at the end of a leaf, a drop in resistance would be recorded on the paper as the moisture arrived between the electrodes. … I noticed something on the chart resembling a human response on a polygraph: not at all what I would have expected from water entering a leaf. Lie detectors work on the principle that when people perceive a threat to their well-being, they physiologically respond in predictable ways. If you were conducting a polygraph as part of a murder investigation, you might ask a suspect, ‘Was it you who fired the shot fatal to so and so? If the true answer were yes, the suspect will fear getting caught lying, and electrodes on his or her skin will pick up the physiological response to that fear. So I began to think of ways to threaten the well-being of the plant. First I tried dipping a neighboring leaf in a cup of warm coffee. The plant, if anything, showed what I now recognize as boredom — the line on the chart just kept trending downward.

“Then at 13 minutes, 55 seconds chart time, the imagery entered my mind of burning the leaf. I didn’t verbalize; I didn’t touch the plant; I didn’t touch the equipment. Yet the plant went wild. The pen jumped right off the top of the chart. The only new thing the plant could have reacted to was the mental image. 

“I went into the next office to get matches from my secretary’s desk, and lighting one, made a few feeble passes at a neighboring leaf. I real­ized, though, that I was already seeing such an extreme reaction that any increase wouldn’t be noticeable. So I tried a different approach: I removed the threat by returning the matches to the secretary’s desk. The plant calmed right back down.

“Immediately I understood something important was going on. I could think of no conventional scientific explanation. There was no one else in the lab suite, and I wasn’t doing anything that might have provided a mechanistic trigger. From that split second my consciousness hasn’t been the same. My whole life has been devoted to looking into this.” 

He called what the plant was doing “primary perception.” He found that not only plants were capable of this: “I’ve been amazed at the percep­tion capability right down to the bacterial level. One sample of yogurt, for example, will pick up when another is being fed. Sort of like, ‘That one’s getting food. Where’s mine?’ That happens with a fair degree of repeatability. Or if you take two samples of yogurt, hook one up to elec­trodes, and drop antibiotics in the other, the electroded yogurt shows a huge response at the other’s death. And they needn’t even be the same kind of bacteria. The first Siamese cat I ever had would only eat chicken. I’d keep a cooked bird in the lab refrigerator and pull off a piece each day to feed the cat. By the time I’d get to the end, the carcass would be pretty old, and bacteria would have started to grow. One day I had some yogurt hooked up, and as I got the chicken out of the refrigerator to begin pulling off strips of meat, the yogurt responded. Next, I put the chicken under a heat lamp to bring it to room temperature, and heat hitting the bacteria created more huge reactions in the yogurt.” 

I asked how he knew he wasn’t influencing it.

“I was unaware of the reaction at the time. I had pip switches all over the lab, and whenever I performed an action, I hit a switch, which placed a mark on a remote chart. Only later did I compare the reaction of the yogurt to what had been happening in the lab.” 
“Did the yogurt respond again when the cat started to eat?”

“Interestingly enough, bacteria appear to have a defense mechanism such that extreme danger causes them to go into a state similar to shock. In effect, they pass out. Many plants do this as well. If you hassle them enough they flatline. The bacteria apparently did this, because as soon as they hit the cat’s digestive system, the signal went out. There was a flatline from then on.” 

Cleve continued, “I was on an airplane once, and had with me a little battery-powered galvanic response meter. Just as the attendants started serving lunch, I pulled out the meter and said to the guy next to me, ‘You want to see something interesting?’ I put a piece of lettuce between the electrodes, and when people started to eat their salads we got some reac­tivity, which stopped as the leaves went into shock. ‘Wait until they pick up the trays,’ I said, ‘and see what happens.’ When attendants removed our meals, the lettuce got back its reactivity. I had the aisle seat, and I can still remember him strapped in next to the window, no way to escape this mad scientist attaching an electronic gadget to lettuce leaves.

“The point is that the lettuce was going into a protective state so it wouldn’t suffer. When the danger left, the reactivity came back. This ceasing of electrical energy at the cellular level ties in, I believe, to the state of shock that people, too, enter in extreme trauma.”

“Plants, bacteria, lettuce leaves …”

“Eggs. I had a Doberman Pinscher back in New York whom I used to feed an egg a day. One day I had a plant hooked up to a large gal­vanic response meter, and as I cracked the egg, the meter went crazy. That started hundreds of hours of monitoring eggs. Fertilized or unfertilized, it doesn’t matter; it’s still a living cell, and plants perceive when that con­tinuity is broken. Eggs, too, have the same defense mechanism. If you threaten them, their tracing goes flat. If you wait about twenty minutes, they come back.

“After working with plants, bacteria, and eggs, I started to wonder how animals would react. But I couldn’t get a cat or dog to sit still long enough to do meaningful monitoring. So I thought I’d try human sperm cells, which are capable of staying alive outside the body for long periods of time, and are certainly easy enough to obtain. I got a sample from a donor, and put it in a test tube with electrodes, then separated the donor from the sperm by several rooms. The donor inhaled amyl nitrate, which dilates blood vessels and is conventionally used to stop a stroke. Just crushing the amyl nitrate caused a big reaction in the sperm, and when the donor inhaled, the sperm went wild.

“So here I am, seeing single-cell organisms on a human level —sperm — that are responding to the donor’s sensations, even when they are no longer in the same room as the donor. There was no way, though, that I could continue that research. It would have been scientifically proper, but politically stupid. The dedicated skeptics would undoubtedly have ridiculed me, asking where my masturbatorium was, and so on.

“Then I met a dental researcher who had perfected a method of gath­ering white cells from the mouth. This was politically feasible, easy to do, and required no medical supervision. I started doing split-screen videotaping of experiments, with the chart readout superimposed at the bottom of the screen showing the donors activities. We took the white cell samples, then sent the people home to watch a preselected television program likely to elicit an emotional response — for example, showing a veteran of Pearl Harbor a documentary on Japanese air attacks. We found that cells outside the body still react to the emotions you feel, even though you may be miles away.

“The greatest distance we’ve tested has been about three hundred miles. Astronaut Brian O’Leary, who wrote Exploring Inner and Outer Space, left his white cells here in San Diego, then flew home to Phoenix. On the way, he kept track of events that aggravated him, carefully logging the time of each. The correlation remained, even over that distance.” 
“The implications of all this …”

He interrupted, laughing. He said, “Yes, are staggering. I have file drawers full of high quality anecdotal data showing time and again how bacteria, plants, and so on are all fantastically in tune with each other. And human cells, too, have this primary perception capability, but somehow its gotten lost at the conscious level.” 

“How has the scientific community received your work?”

“With the exception of scientists at the margins, like Rupert Shel­drake, it was met first with derision, then hostility, and mostly now with silence. At first they called primary perception ‘the Backster Effect,’ per­haps hoping they could trivialize the observations by naming them after this wild man who claimed to see things missed by mainstream science. The name stuck, but because primary perception can’t be readily dis­missed, it is no longer a term of contempt."

“What’s the primary criticism by mainstream scientists?”

“The big problem — and this is a problem as far as conscious­ness research in general is concerned — is repeatability. The events I’ve observed have all been spontaneous. They have to be. If you plan them out in advance, you’ve already changed them. It all boils down to this: repeatability and spontaneity do not go together, and as long as mem­bers of the scientific community overemphasize repeatability in scientific methodology, they’re not going to get very far in consciousness research.

“Not only is spontaneity important, but so is intent. You can’t pretend. If you say you are going to burn a plant, but don’t mean it, nothing will happen. I hear constantly from people in different parts of the country, wanting to know how to cause plant reactions. I tell them, ‘Don’t do anything special. Go about your work; keep notes so later you can tell what you were doing at specific times, and then compare them to your chart recording. But don’t plan anything, or the experiment won’t work.’ People who do this often get equivalent responses to mine, and often win first prize in science fairs. But when they get to Biology 101, they’re told that what they have experienced is not important.

“There have been a few attempts by scientists to replicate my exper­iments … but these have all been methodologically inadequate. … It is so very easy to fail. … And let’s be honest: some of the scientists were relieved when they failed, because success would have gone against the body of scientific knowledge.”

I said, “For scientists to give up predictability means they have to give up control, which means they have to give up Western culture, which means it’s not going to happen until civilization collapses under the weight of its own ecological excesses.”

He nodded, then said, “I have given up trying to fight other scientists on this, because I know that even if the experiment fails they still see things that change their consciousness. People who would not have said anything 20 years ago often say to me, ‘I think I can safely tell you now how you really changed my life with what you were doing back in the early 70s.’ These scientists didn’t feel they had the luxury back then to rock the boat; their credibility, and thus their grant requests, would have been affected.” 

I asked if there were alternative explanations for the polygraph read­ings. I’d read that one person suggested his machine must have had a loose wire.

He responded, “In 31 years of research I’ve found all my loose wires. No, I can’t see any mechanistic solution. Some parapsychologists believe I’ve mastered the art of psychokinesis — that I move the pen with my mind — which would be a pretty good trick itself. But they overlook the fact that I’ve automated and randomized many of the experiments to where I’m not even aware of what’s going on until later, when I study the resulting charts and videotapes. The conventional explanations have worn pretty thin. One such explanation, proposed in Harper’s, was static electricity: if you scuffle across the room and touch the plant, you get a response. But of course I seldom touch the plant during periods of obser­vation, and in any case the response would be totally different.” 

“So, what is the signal picked up by the plant?"

“I don’t know. I don’t believe the signal, whatever it is, dissipates over distance, which is what we’d get if we were dealing with electromagnetic phenomenon. I used to hook up a plant, then take a walk with a random­ized timer in my pocket. When the timer went off, I’d return home. The plant always responded the moment I turned around, no matter the dis­tance. And the signal from Phoenix was just as strong as if Brian O’Leary were in the next room. Also, we’ve attempted to screen the signal using lead-lined containers, and other materials, but we can’t screen it out. This makes me think the signal doesn’t actually go from here to there, but instead manifests itself in different places. All this, of course, lands us firmly in the territory of the metaphysical, the spiritual.” 

I said, “Primary perception suggests a radical redefinition of con­sciousness.”

“You mean it would do away with the notion of consciousness as some­thing on which humans have a monopoly?” He hesitated a moment, then continued, “Western science exaggerates the role of the brain in con­sciousness. Whole books have been written on the consciousness of the atom. Consciousness might exist on an entirely different level.” 

I asked whether he had worked with materials that would normally be considered inanimate.

“I’ve shredded some things and suspended them in agar. I get electric signals, but not necessarily relating to anything going on in the environ­ment. It’s too crude an electroding pattern for me to decipher. But I do suspect that consciousness goes much, much further. In 1987 I partic­ipated in a University of Missouri program that included a talk by Dr. Sidney Fox, then connected with the Institute for Molecular and Cellular Evolution at the University of Miami. Fox had recorded electric signals from protein-like material that showed properties strikingly similar to those of living cells. The simplicity of the material he used and the self organizing capability it displayed suggest to me that bio-communication was present at the earliest states in the evolution of life on this planet. Of course the Gaia hypothesis — the idea that the earth is a great big working organism, with a lot of corrections built in — fits in nicely with this. I don’t think it would be a stretch to take the hypothesis further and pre­sume that the planet itself is intelligent.” 

I asked how his work has been received in other parts of the world.

“The Russians and other eastern Europeans have always been very interested. And whenever I encounter Indian scientists — Buddhist or Hindu — and we talk about what I do, instead of giving me a bunch of grief they say, ‘What took you so long?’ My work dovetails very well with many of the concepts embraced by Hinduism and Buddhism.” 

“What is taking us so long?”

“The fear is that, if what I am observing is accurate, many of the theo­ries on which we’ve built our lives need complete reworking. I’ve known biologists to say, ‘If Backster is right, we’re in trouble.’ It takes a certain kind of character and personality to even attempt such a questioning of fundamental assumptions. The Western scientific community, and actu­ally all of us, are in a difficult spot, because in order to maintain our cur­rent mode of being, we must ignore a tremendous amount of informa­tion. And more information is being gathered all the time. For instance, have you heard of Rupert Sheldrake’s work with dogs? He puts a time-re­cording camera on both the dog at home and the human companion at work. He has discovered that even if people come home from work at a different time each day, at the moment the person leaves work, the dog at home heads for the door.

“Even mainstream scientists are stumbling all over this bio-commu­nication phenomenon. It seems impossible, given the sophistication of modern instrumentation, for us to keep missing this fundamental attunement of living things. Only for so long are we going to be able to pretend it’s the result of ‘loose wires.’ We cannot forever deny that which is so clearly there.” 


—Derrick Jensen 

An activist, philosopher, farmer, teacher, and leading voice of uncompromising dissent, Derrick Jensen is the author or co-author of many books including A Language Older Than Words, What We Leave Behind, and Deep Green Resistance. Reprinted from his latest book, The Myth of Human Supremacy (Seven Stories, 2016).



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note to self

 





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If we look far enough back in the depths of time, the disordered anthill of living beings suddenly, for an informed observer, arranges itself in long files that make their way by various paths towards greater consciousness.


—Teilhard de Chardin



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What we observe is not nature itself, 
but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

—Werner Heisenberg



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every mode of perception is subjective

   





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When you look at anything, it is the ultimate you see, but you imagine that you see a cloud or a tree. Learn to look without imagination, to listen without distortion: that is all. 
Stop attributing names and shapes to the essentially nameless and formless, realize that every mode of perception is subjective, that what is seen or heard, touched or smelt, felt or thought, expected or imagined, is in the mind and not in reality, and you will experience peace and freedom from fear.

Even the sense of ‘I am’ is composed of the pure light and the sense of being. The ‘I’ is there even without the ‘am’. So is the pure light there whether you say ‘I’ or not. Become aware of that pure light and you will never lose it. The beingness in being, the awareness in consciousness, the interest in every experience — that is not describable, yet perfectly accessible, for there is nothing else.


—Ramana Maharshi


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In order to “see” these idealizations, we must as a first step accept the fact that beneath our world lies another one, that our three-dimensional world is embedded in the inner world.


—Norman Friedman
Bridging Science and Spirit



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The best method is to plunge deep into the inner man and remain there in seclusion, constantly tending the vineyard of one’s heart.


—St. Isaac of Syria



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