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Green-Grey Matter

The scene: a Time Square laboratory, New York.
The date: a February night in 1966.
Actors: Cleve Backster, teacher and polygraph operator for the CIA, and a dracena cane (a large leafed tropical houseplant resembling a miniature palm-tree).
Props: a Wheatstone bridge, a resistance recording device used to measure galvanic skin responses and part of the polygraph.

At this point the reader paying attention is probably wondering why a plant is listed as an actor in this particular play, and not as a prop. If you are, then you're in for the same kind of surprise that Cleve Backster was - a surprise that was to fundamentally change both his personal beliefs and the direction of his scientific life.

Anyway, at this particular date Backster was working late, as he was prone to do, and at some point he noticed that his plants (the dracena was joined by a rubber plant on the windowsill) could use some water. Backster saturated the roots of both plants under running water, and being inquisitive by nature and an experimenter by habit, decided to find out how long osmosis would take. Osmosis is the process by which the plant draws water into its system, and Cleve had the instruments at hand to measure this. Being particularly interested in the dracena, long-stemmed as it was, he hooked up one of its leaves to the galvanic skin response section of the polygraph. What should have happened then was a slow upward climb on the readout, representing the arrival of moisture in the leaf. This did not happen. Instead the readout showed a downward trend, and the line was serrated, not straight. This downward trend continued for a minute and then, to Backster's amazement, the plant reacted as if it were a human taking a lie-detector test rather than the process of water entering a leaf.

Being a leading expert on polygraph tests himself, and not one likely to misinterpret the readout, he decided to cause the plant some discomfort, in order to see if it reacted. First he dunked the leaf into a cup of coffee, but this did not cause the plant to react, probably because it wasn't hot enough. Going for a more drastic approach, he decided to get a match from the other room and burn the leaf. The same instant as he got this idea, thirteen minutes and fifty-five seconds into the readout, the polygraph registered a sudden and prolonged upward sweep. This, in a human, would be interpreted as a reaction of fear. Pretty freaky, as they say.

Backster, hardly surprising, was baffled. He hadn't even moved, yet the plant had reacted instantly and violently to the mere thought of being harmed. It was almost as if the plant was reading his mind. He left, returned with the matches, lit one and made a few feeble passes at a neighbouring leaf. At this point the plant was reacting so violently that is was impossible to discern any further change. Opting for a different approach, Backster removed the threat by returning the matches to the draws of his secretary's desk. The plant immediately calmed down again.

The next morning Backster told his associate Robert Henson about what had passed the evening before, and as Henson decided that he too would burn the plant it reacted instantly again. This was the beginning of some of the most fascinating research into consciousness of the twentieth century. Research with a fair share of implications into the nature of consciousness and thus spirit, as we shall see

The Secret Life of Plants

In the following decades, Cleve Backster has invested a lot of time and energy into researching the 'secret life' of plants. This research soon developed to encompass not only the cells of plants but also that of animals and humans. The evidence of consciousness found at the cellular level, which will be examined in this chapter, Backster named "Primary Perception". It might be tempting to use the parapsychological term extra-sensory-perception or perhaps plant-ESP, but as Backster points out: "plants don't have most of the first five senses to begin with". The term 'primary' refers to the instant reaction on the cellular level to significant changes in the environment, no matter how far away the cause of the change was. To sum things up, our cells become aware of changes long before the rest of our organism, or at least before the consciousness we think as our 'self' perceives anything.

I'm afraid that the concept of 'self' will get increasingly more complicated as this book progresses. As we shall see in this chapter, the distinction between our 'selves' and or cells is yet another challenge that modern scientific paradigms will have to come to terms with. Unfortunately modern science, or rather western science, has not been very dedicated in following up on Backster's experiments. Perhaps this is due to the difficulties of repeatability, demanding a different experimental protocol to what most biologists are familiar and thus more comfortable with, but on a more fundamental level, it is probably due to the implications of primary perception. A world of living, feeling, communicating and at least to some extent conscious plants is a rather provocative picture to the fit into the western frame of scientific mind. If accepted as a fact, much of modern biology and ecology would have to be re-evaluated, and much of its foundation would have to be discarded.

 

Några experiment:

Brine Shrimp Soup

Having concluded fairly early that plants reacted to immediate threat as well as actual physical damage, Backster attempted to find out if plants reacted to threats and damage done to living organisms in their surroundings. In order to do this he would dump live brine shrimp at random intervals into a pot of boiling water in the vicinity of the monitored plant. The instant the shrimp hit the water the plant would react.
Backster assumed that the death of living organisms nearby alarmed the plant as this was threatening despite the fact that the plant had no previous 'relation' to the shrimp. After repeating this procedure a few times, the plant stopped reacting. It seemed as if the plants became more interested in tuning into Backster than into dying shrimp. So, were Backster's reactions overriding that of the shrimp?

To test this, Backster had an assistant purchase new plants which he did not tend to, and which were stored in a part of the building that he did not frequent. At the last moment he would attached them to the polygraph, so the plants would not form an affinity to any of the researchers. A time delay switch was used, so that the shrimp would be dumped into boiling water when no one was around. This proved successful once or twice but by the third try the plant usually 'lost interest', perhaps because it 'realised' that the death of the shrimp did in no way herald its own immediate demise. In any case, it adapted to the situation fairly quickly.

As pointed out above, if the researchers tended to the plants for a time, they would form an affinity to their caretakers, and the polygraph readouts would seem to reflect the conversations of the humans rather than the death of the shrimp. This took Backster and his associates some time to figure out, as simply leaving the room was not sufficient action to 'shake off' the plants. This affinity towards the human provider or caretaker Backster discovered on one occasion when he accidentally cut his finger, which apart from causing him pain instantly caused a reaction of emotional distress in the plant.

This affinity towards humans did not seem to diminish even over distance. Only by taking the above-mentioned precautions, moving the plants to an unfamiliar surrounding and causing some kind of distraction, would the plants pay any attention to the shrimp, and only once or twice at that. All in all, plants seemed to have a special capacity for developing a bond to humans, which allowed for another interesting line of research.

Going Home

To test the bond between plant and human caretaker, one must continually monitor the plant and simultaneously keep some kind of track on the behaviour of the human.
It is sometimes claimed that pets in general, and dogs in particular, can 'sense' when their masters are returning home, and run to the door to greet them. This they do despite the fact that it can take from a few minutes to hours for said masters to return. So, if true, the pets are not reacting to the sound of footsteps along the path but to the mental decision of their owner to return, or something similar to that. This claim was tested by biologist Rupert Sheldrake, known for his theory of morphic resonance , by comparative videotaping of the behaviour of pets at home and their owners at work, which resulted in some support for the claim. As the same relationship seemed to exist between plants and their keepers, Backster tested this by walking about town until he randomly decided that it was time to return to the laboratory. Writing down the time in his notebook, Backster would then return and check the readouts on the plants that were continuously running.
Sure enough, the plants would have reacted favourably at the instant Backster had decided to return home. Apparently they could sense when this was happening, despite being separated by distance. The distance itself seemed to be of no consequence whatsoever. In other tests the conversation between humans would be recorded, and the rise and fall of the emotional content would be clearly reflected in the rise and fall of the plants agitation. Non-local consciousness seems well and alive in plants also.

Single Cell Sensitivity

As noted above, this apparent ability to sense and express emotion was not restricted to organisms as evolved and differentiated as plants, but also to such simple organisms as bacteria. More interestingly, the single white blood cells of humans would demonstrate a particularly strong bond to the person they originated from. Backster found that oral leukocytes, i.e. white blood cells removed from a person's mouth, placed in a test tube, would respond electrochemically to the donor's emotional states, notwithstanding if the donor was out of the room, out of the building or out of state. One of the ways this bond was tested and verified was through split-screen videotaping of experiments, with the chart readout superimposed at the bottom of a screen showing the donor's activities.

The implications of this kind of communication are of course staggering. Single cells have no brains, and are, at least according to the orthodox view, pre-programmed to behave in a specific way. Exactly how this works has not been answered so far, but it has been comfortably assumed that this is due to neural activity and chemical triggers. After all, in what other way would the brain and the rest of the body communicate short of magic?

The "Backster Effect" suggests a completely different and non-local kind of communication, one between mind/consciousness and organism, rather than brain and body. Much as the consciousness of one person can influence the autonomic nervous system of another, as demonstrated in chapter three, it seems that the consciousness of the individual can interact with his or her body without using the direct paths of the brain (electrical or chemical communication). The implications for such branches of science as neurology are of course quite staggering. But before we get carried away; are we really talking about an individual consciousness here, or "merely" the reflection of consciousness? A mirror can reflect a convincing image of a person, yet we would not accredit that image any autonomy whatsoever. It does what we do, is capable only of reflecting action, not acting independently. Is it possible that plants and cells merely "reflect" the emotions of their surroundings, in particular those of their keepers?

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