I happened upon a solitary copy of "The Secret Life of Plants" by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird at a book shop I visited some time back. If you rememeber this is the book Linda mentioned in Star Signs as one describing Cleve Backster's research into Plants and their ability to respond to the the emotions and thoughts of other living beings around them. Those of you who've read the Celestine Prophecy - An Experiential Guide, might also have recognised the name in relation to the Third Insight.

I've only just started reading the book and it's already quite fascinating! Here's an excerpt that really made me sit up and pause, so I thought I'd share:

Quote:

---

In Japan a soft-spoken doctor of philosophy and successful electronics engineer from Kamakura, a charmingly gardened retreat not far from Yokohama harbor, has developed a similar lie detector into a device with the most fabulous results yet achieved in the plant kingdom. A regular consultant on lie detection for the Japanese police, Dr. Ken Hashimoto read about Backster's laboratory experiments and decided to wire one of the family cactuses to an ordinary polygraph by means of acupuncture needles.

His intent was more revolutionary than Backster's, Sauvin's or Byrd's. He hoped to enter into actual conversation with a plant; to do so he counted on an improvement he had made in the Japanese procedure for lie detection. To simplify and make less expensive the process of police interrogation, Dr. Hashimoto developed a system, similar to Dektor's, whereby nothing more than a cassette tape is needed to record the reactions of a suspect. Electronically transposing the modulations of the suspect's voice, Hashimoto was able to produce on a paper a running graph reliable enough to pass muster in a Japanese law court.

It now dawned on Hashimoto that by reversing the system he might be able to transform the tracings from a graph into modulated sounds, giving voice to a plant. His first experiments with a cactus similar to the giant saguaro of California and the Arizona desert, but much smaller, were a failure. Loath to conclude that either Backster's reports or his own equipment was defective, Hashimoto decided that it might be he who was having trouble communicating with the plant, despite the fact that he is one of Japan's leading researchers into psychic phenomena.

His wife, on the other hand, who loves plants and is renowned for her "green thumb", soon got sensational results. As Mrs. Hashimoto assured the plant that she loved it, there was an instant response from the cactus. Transformed and amplified by Dr. Hashimoto's electronic equipment, the sound produced by the plant was like the high-pitched hum of very-high-voltage wires heard from a distance, except that it was more like a song, the rhythm and tone being varied and pleasant, at times even warm and almost jolly.

John Francis Dougherty, a young American from Marina Del Rey, California, who witnessed one of these conversations, says it sounded as if Mrs. Hashimoto, speaking in modulated Japanese, was being answered by the plant in modulated "cactese". Dougherty further reports that the Hashimotos became so intimate with their plant that they were soon able to teach it to count and add up to twenty. In answer to a query as to how much two and two make, the plant would respond with sounds which, when transcribed back into inked tracings, produced four distinct and conjoined peaks.

Dr. Hashimoto, who got his doctorate from Tokyo University, and is chief of the Hashimoto Electronics Research Center, as well as managing director and chief of research for the Fuji Electronic Industries - which produce the huge animated electrical signs that illumine Tokyo - has since demonstrated the adding capacities of his cactus to audiences all over Japan.

Asked to explain the phenomenon of his talking and adding cactus, Dr. Hashimoto, who is also, surprisingly, one of Japan's best-selling authors - his Introduction to ESP is in its sixtieth printing and his Mystery of the Fourth Dimensional World is in its eightieth - answered of present-day physics. He believes there is a world beyond the present three-dimensional world defined by physics, that this three-dimensional world is merely a shadow of a fourth-dimensional, nonmaterial world. He further believes that this fourth-dimensional world controls the three-dimensional material world through what he calls "mind concentration" or what others call psychokinesis or mind-over-matter.

---

WOW!!!
Thanks for sharing that! I'll have to look for that book too. I remember Linda's references to it in Star Signs and thought it was cool then, but that excerpt is amazing!

Love,
Terri

Love your new avatar, Suchi.

Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth says something along the lines of the idea that the central tragic irony that people have always had to grapple with is that we have to kill to live because we have to eat. Even if we don't eat meat, we still know that we have to consume what was living to keep living. And there's something harrowing about it.

I actually remember being quite young and feeling appalled and nauseated at the realization that the yummy drumstick I was eating used to be the leg of a real live chicken. I did get over it. I do like meat. And I like a lot of plants as food too.

But still, in that idea that at some point it strikes us and is always with us ... the idea that we have to kill to live ... I think in some way that matches up with the whole idea of "original sin" or being born into a state of inherent inescapable need to be raised up out of the animal nature in which we have to kill to live and in which we eventually die.

If some cactus gets my consciousness sometime on from now, I hope it can count farther than 20.

Maria,
entertaining odd thoughts

Oh, I would definitely recommend the book, Terri. It's rarely ever dull reading even with some technical jargon thrown in.

Thanks, Maria. The avatar was a birthday gift from Cristina that I happened upon as I was going through old threads. All thanks to our brilliant Graphics Witch!

Quote:

---

Even if we don't eat meat, we still know that we have to consume what was living to keep living.

---

That used to be my counter-argument against snooty vegetarians trying to fault me for eating non-veg. Now I'm veg myself and tease the rest of my family about eating dead bodies. *evil devil icon*

It's also the reason why Linda's fruitarian argument made a lot of sense to me. Fruits are probably the only food items (other than perhaps milk) that you can consume without feeling guilty about killing someone to obtain it. They're supposed to fall off the tree eventually anyway.

This book however talks about the phenomenon of "fainting" plants (also described by Linda in Star Signs) and how it might suggest that being consumed may be the eventual purpose of plants.

Quote:

---

This experience helped to bring Backster to the realisation that plants could intentionally be put into a faint, or mesmerized, by humans, that something similar could be involved in the ritual of the slaughterer before an animal is killed in the kosher manner. Communicating with the victim, the killer may tranquilize it into a quiet death, also preventing its flesh from having a residue of "chemical fear", disagreeable to the palate and perhaps noxious to the consumer. This brought up the possibility that plants and succulent fruits might wish to be eaten, but only in a sort of loving ritual with a real communication between the eater and the eaten - somehow akin to the Christian rite of Communion - instead of the usual heartless carnage.

"It may be," says Backster, "that a vegetable appreciates becoming part of another form of life rather than rotting on the ground, just as a human at death may experience relief to find himself in a higher realm of being."

---

I still can't see an animal wanting to be eaten, though. I wouldn't want to be eaten even if I feel there is no other purpose to my life.