Shortly after Practical Magick first opened, the beautiful, and very talented Dr. Elizabeth Young gave a fascinating introductory talk; first in a series about herbs and their medicinal and magical use. She had a Masters in Botany and a Doctorate in toxicology, which was a good start, but her great appeal was the way in which she treated plants with the respect that they deserve as fellow travelers on space ship Earth, and not just as fodder, or raw material to be exploited.
The experience brought back memories of a meditation I once had on a closely related subject, and as Dar' Shem and Reiki people at Practical Magick have experienced 'being at one' with another person, creature or thing, I present it here for your consideration.
At that time the ability of blue-green algae, particularly the algae from Klamath Lake to fill all the nutritional gaps in human diet was just becoming well known. Now there are many varieties of algae being touted as supplements.
During a meditation period it all came together in the "Inner Colonization and Cosmic Orchestra Theory." Here is a summary of the bits and pieces that came together, based on the reading of many years, and a few recent pieces of research. You of course may come up with a totally different idea, but the facts have their intrinsic value anyway.
Back in 1966 there was a man named Backster, who was a renowned police expert on the polygraph, a machine that measures emotional responses electrically and records them as a continuously produced rolling graph.
The machine became known as a lie detector, probably a reflection of the autobiography of the journalist who named it such.
On a very special day Backster casually attached electrodes to his office Draecana plants after a hard day's work. He watered the plant and was very surprised to see the needle go down on the paper. He expected it to go up as the electrical resistance became less on the very well-watered plant.
He examined the saw tooth pattern and recognized it as similar to a human response to a short term emotion, rather surprising in a plant. His detective instinct was aroused. He began to experiment.
The best way to get a big jump on the galvanometer is to threaten the survival or well being of the subject; so Backster dumped one of the leaves into his hot coffee. Nothing much happened so he began to dream up worse things to do, like an ignored two year old trying to be noticed. He decided to burn the electroded leaf with a lighted match. As soon as he had the idea the needle jumped wildly. When he came back with the matches there was another surge that seemed to be responding to his determination to carry out the idea.
He burnt the leaf and there was a set of reactions. When he pretended to be going to burn the leaf there was no reaction. When he actually intended doing so, there was. The plant could not be fooled.
He threw himself into the research, knowing well the ignorance-based skepticism that passes today as a scientific attitude. He, and other polygraph experts all over the country duplicated his experiments on more than twenty- five different plants and vegetables. In the end there was no doubt that the plants had the power and capacity to pick up signals from humans in some way more basic than our specialized five senses.When the experiments were extended in bigger facilities to include animals and insects, it was found that the plants were picking up any threats to the animals and any intentions of the animals. One very cogent fact was observed when a plant physiologist came to see Backster's plants perform—and none of them did for hours.
It astonished Backster when it transpired that the man's job was to kill plants, roast them in ovens, and analyze the ash. The incident initiated a series of experiments that showed how plants, like fainting humans, could pass out, under stress.
When Backster connected up a plant and asked a reporter multiple choice questions about his date of birth, the plant indicated the true date although the reporter said "No," to every question.
When one of six students drawn at random killed one of the plants, Backster could unfailingly identify who did it by the response of the plants as the different students passed by those plants present when the deed was done.
There is much more to his work than this trifling summary of course, and his work was carried into the realm of therapy by Vogel. He found that his plants could respond to his mental changes when he was hundreds of miles away. He went on from there to investigate ways in which this sensitivity of plants could be used to help therapists identify the mental repressions not accessible to the conscious mind of their patients.
Both men honed their techniques until they were able to produce results on demand. They even demonstrated the amazing powers of plants on TV. You can read about these wonders in The Secret Life of Plants by Tomkins and Bird.
Lumberjacks don’t use the wood from trees that have fallen with no humans in their vicinity. It has been discovered that the very presence of humans within a couple of hundred meters of a tree causes it to experience stress. The ultra violet radiation that such trees give off can be perceived by psychics as a vapor. The stressed trees ‘tighten up’ and fall with quite a different sound from unstressed trees. The wood is stiff enough to use for building, unlike the wood of an unstressed tree that falls. The old question of Bishop Berkley about a tree falling in a forest if nobody is near has been answered. A tree that falls with no human near produces a different sound than one that falls with humans in the vicinity. Recordings verify this.
But the success of such experiments and the new awareness that they evoked produced an even more surprising, and again unchallengable result. In October 1971 an electronics specialist named L. George Lawrence was investigating the 'Backster effect' in the desert near Mount Palomar in California. He was using specialized equipment designed by himself and much more sensitive than Backster's polygraphs.
To his great surprise he found that the plants he was checking were apparently picking up strong signals from the sky! When he checked the coordinates he found that they seemed to emanate from the region of the Big Dipper.
He suspected a malfunctioning of his equipment, but noted the results and lugged everything back to the lab for checking. The equipment worked perfectly. There was nothing whatever wrong with it. However, he redesigned it to rule out all possible and improbable explanations.
Next time he checked it out was April 1972 in the Mojave Desert Exactly the same thing happened. He wrote an article about his discoveries in a report to the Smithsonian Institute, suggesting that here was a fertile field of exploration that should be entered by science.
Lawrence's initial conclusion is that what parapsychologists call the psi effect is actually part of a paranormal communication matrix that includes all life. His experiments lend weight to one of my own soap boxes. I think it is totally absurd to spend millions of dollars looking for radio signals from outer space, when everyone who has any experience of psychic matters knows that mind-to-mind communication occurs at all biological levels without electronics.
The evolutionary process is producing more and more people who have access to 'paranormal' ways of sending and receiving communications. Our own Practical Magick groups contain people for whom aura perception and telepathic communication are commonplace.
When we consider the way in which our technological and parapsychological knowledge and abilities are accelerating I must conclude that the state of the art in both spheres in a hundred years will be beyond our current ability to forsee.
Therefore, a civilization several thousands or hundreds of thousands of years ahead of ours would be unlikely to be using such a primitive method of sending signals as our pitiful modern radio.
The Russian psi experiments with cosmonauts show that thought transfer is superior in speed to radio messages because it is instantaneous, and doesn't obey the inverse square law that limits much of our normal ways of sending messages.
That little sidestep I couldn't resist. So back to integrate the next item of the pattern which is the discovery by Dr. Ohno, the Japanese geneticist. He did work on mapping the DNA, and determined the positions of the four nucleotides that string together in various patterns to make our genetic material. Some of the Practical Magick customers have already investigated the work of Jewish scientist/mystics who started by assigning these four to the different four letters of the name of God in Hebrew; the permutations of which were considered to have produced the current universe.
Dr. Ohno used a quite different approach. He assigned the notes of the Tonic Sol Fa scale to the nucleotides. He found that when written in this way, as music, the human gene material sounded like the music of Bach, Chopin, and other classical composers.
The DNA doesn't have to be written in chemical symbols like C, H, O, and N. It can be written as music, and is often beautiful music. It was also found that applying the same techniques to diseased tissues produced very discordant music.
Maybe here we have a clue about the scientifically validated ability of some kinds of classical music to accelerate the healing process.
Adding that to Backster, Vogel, and Lawrence, not to mention Plato and Kepler's views on the 'music of the spheres,' we can look upon the whole animal and plant kingdom, and maybe crystals too, as an enormous orchestra in which we humans are first chair musicians, not the top of some biological pyramid.
We may be great soloists in our own right, but every other life form is part of the music, and is needed for the music of the cosmic symphony to be properly performed. This is exactly the viewpoint of the Amerindians, expressed in the speeches of their great chiefs.
From this perspective we don't pass genes to the next generation. We pass our songs and melodies. Those who come from a tradition of bards and story tellers, pay attention. Survival of the fittest could be like the ability of jazz musicians to play perfectly together, although everyone is actually extemporizing. Staying healthy could be a matter of just staying in key. Carry on the analogy yourself if you meditate. It could easily bring you great insights with little effort.
