PLANTS, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND RATIONES SEMINALES
Regular readers here are aware that I'm fascinated by consciousness studies and the relationship of consciousness to the brain. These studies actually began in the 19th century, and typically were done by spiritualists or other "New Agers" of the era as a reaction to the Victorian age's galloping materialism and "mechanism" cosmology. World War One shattered much of that, and consciousness studies moved into private research or, in the cases of a few begrudging universities, into the academy. The rise of quantum mechanics in physics also provided a huge impetus to the effort, since the Uncertainty Principle prioritized the role of the Observer in experiments. As the 2oth century proceeded, more data was amassed, and increasingly it looks as if the brain-consciousness, or brain-mind relationship is not as ironclad nor materialistically biased as it once appeared. Cases began to be documented of people living normal lives, with almost no brain, or significant parts of their brains missing (see https://www.iflscience.com/brain/man-tiny-brain-lived-normal-life/). Neuronal structures have been discovered in the human heart, perhaps indicating a kind of "distributed brain", and perhaps buttressing the more ancient idea that human reason is inclusive of, rather than exclusive of, human emotions and passions, and is not mere Cartesian ratiocination. If that idea sounds a little crazy, then consider the octopus (one of my favorite animals). These creatures are demonstrably intelligent; they not only learn, but can learn by observing other octopi performing tasks and solving problems and puzzles. They have nine brains: a central one, and one in each of their tentacles, yet their actions show that there is one "entity" inside of all of that. Crows have been documented solving multi-step puzzles, and so on.
As the stories about people without significant portions of a normal brain might also indicate, size is apparently no factor either. I've told the story of a friend of mine, Dr. Scott DeHart, who owns an African gray parrot named Murray. When leaving his presence, I used to say, "You be a good bird, I'll be right back." On one occasion, however, and much to my and one of Dr. DeHart's son's surprise, Murray spoke before I could give my customary farewell statement, and he stated "I'll be a good bird." It was a sentence he had never heard before, composed on the spot, with proper grammar and apposite to the context! Needless to say, our jaws were on the floor.
That brings me to today's article shared by V.T., and to today's high octane speculation, and it concerns life forms with no brains at all, plants:
There's something in this article that caught my eye, and it forms the context for my high octane speculation of the day, and it's this:
When it comes to plants, I’ve always thought that they were living, thinking, breathing, conscious beings. Grover Cleveland Backster Jr., was an interrogation specialist for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who became well known for his experiments with plants using a lie-detector machine. Through his research, he believed that plants feel pain and have extrasensory perception (ESP). Author Michael Polan describes his experiments quite well in a piece he wrote for the New Yorkera few years ago regarding plant intelligence:
(Cleve) hooked up a galvanometer to the leaf of a dracaena, a houseplant that he kept in his office. To his astonishment, Backster found that simply by imagining the dracaena being set on fire he could make it rouse the needle of the polygraph machine, registering a surge of electrical activity suggesting that the plant felt stress. “Could the plant have been reading his mind?” the authors ask. “Backster felt like running into the street and shouting to the world, ‘Plants can think!’ ”
Backster and his collaborators went on to hook up polygraph machines to dozens of plants, including lettuces, onions, oranges, and bananas. He claimed that plants reacted to the thoughts (good or ill) of humans in close proximity and, in the case of humans familiar to them, over a great distance. In one experiment designed to test plant memory, Backster found that a plant that had witnessed the murder (by stomping) of another plant could pick out the killer from a lineup of six suspects, registering a surge of electrical activity when the murderer was brought before it. Backster’s plants also displayed a strong aversion to interspecies violence. Some had a stressful response when an egg was cracked in their presence, or when live shrimp were dropped into boiling water.
And then there's this:
Poland also describes the work of Monica Gagliano, a thirty-seven-year-old animal ecologist at the University of Western Australia. He describes an experiment she conducted with the plant Mimosa pudica, a fast moving plant that can be seen by the naked eye, kind of like the Venus Fly Trap.
Gagliano potted fifty-six of these plants, and had a system that dropped them from 15 centimetres every five seconds. When they are in danger, these plans curl up, and close their leaves. The plants did this after a few drops, but then realized that the drops weren’t really harmful so they remained open after that. It wasn’t just fatigue either, when the plants were shaken they closed up, and furthermore, the plants retained this knowledge because Gagliano tried again a month later and got the same response.
Gagliano said, imagining these events from the plants’ point of view. “You see, you want to be attuned to something new coming in. Then we went back to the drops, and they didn’t respond.” Gagliano reported that she retested her plants after a week and found that they continued to disregard the drop stimulus, indicating that they “remembered” (source)
Clearly, they learn, remember and apply that knowledge. These are all factors associated with consciousness and thinking. There has to be something or someone in there that’s responsible for that learning. (Emphasis added)
These things made me remember an ancient doctrine of some of the philosophers, which was picked up by many of the Church Fathers, and which persisted all the way up to such people as St. Maximus the Confessor in the 7th century. The doctrine is that of the rationes seminales (in the Greek, logoi spermatikoi), the "seminal reasons". Maximus went as far as to say in one of his works (the seventh Ambigua, if you're interested), that "The One Logos", meaning Christ, "is the many logoi, and the many logoi are the one Logos." These "seminal reasons" were the rational principles, in "small" or "seedlike" form, that existed in all things as their raison d'etre, so to speak, and particularly in living things. This idea makes short shrift of the modern notions of ancient ideas, the notion that the ancients viewed only mankind as rational, and all other things, especially living things, like animals, as irrational. Rather than being some sort of dialectical opposition between man(rational) and other living things (irrational), it was rather a sliding continuum of rationality, with perhaps different types of rationality and consciousness being exhibited in specific cases. (The idea went so far that in the Middle Ages, there are records of animals actually being put on trial, and the idea perhaps persists in a new guise in modern laws regarding the destruction of dangerous animals by court order.) The metaphor of plants is in evidence in the choice of words used to describe the metaphor itself: seeds of rational principles. Maximus, by stating what he stated, is not only implying some underlying consciousness to things, but also tying that consciousness in his case to the one Logos underlying them all, implying that they live and move in that "meta-consciousness" so to speak.
Which brings me to my high octane speculation of the day: are we looking at the beginning of a modern scientific confirmation of a very old idea? Perhaps, for I cannot help but think that had certain Stoic philosophers, or for that matter, certain Church Fathers - a Maximus or an Augustine or a Justin Martyr - would have immediately recognized these modern studies of plants as examples of what they were all calling "seminal reasons." And that raises yet another intriguing speculative possibility. Is that ancient doctrine of seminal reasons yet another holdover of a high science of a high civilization lost in the mists of "pre-history"? For my part, I think so, and I'd be willing to bet on it.
See you on the flip side...
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What about GMO plant life?
DNA seems to be the interface, emitting photons, to conscienceness.
What if you start tinkering in a brute fashion way with this DNA, like how it is done in the GMO business… do you get Mad Max plants then? Coliflower going berserk? Incredible Hulk sprouts?
What the hell are we doing with these beings?
Slavery, chimeras and consciousness:
In some mystical circles, consciousness is described as the substance of all things. It is not found in our five senses(taste, touch, sound, sight, smell) yet one description states it is closer than our hands or feet and nearer than breathing. Consciousness is presented as a invisible substrate underlying all the universe which can be accessed by mortal humans through (everybody has to decide on a path that fits individual needs) the pursuit of enlightenment – the wild art of dispelling personal ignorance.
Given that Cosmic War(s) took place here, I am in the camp that we were quarantined. Slavery and chimeras didn’t work out so well for humans last time around. It will not work out so well this time either.
Yet if you find yourself having a “real” conversation with a plant, you are either deep into delusion, or having a profound transcendental/mystical[T/M]
experience. These[T/M] experiences are fascinating for no matter how one goes about eliciting such an experience – go live in a cave, eat the right foods, say the right words, read the right texts, visit with the right people, think the correct thoughts, be a good person, sacrifice and by all means, get the sacrifice right – there is no guarantee that such behavior will get one closer to the[T/M] experience; in fact, it can be quite puzzling for the mind to witness a 13 year old speaking wise truths because of their recent transcendental/mystical experience. It would seem then, there is some kind of “lost” access for humanity here. The mystical experience is fully participatory and takes place in the now, any deviation from this, maybe a thought questioning your reality at the moment, will instantly stop the mystical event. If this is the case, then for the duration of the[T/M] event, whether six seconds or six hours, the topological metaphor is disabled.
Cited article is great! Thanks.
I mentioned the following here, long ago. My ladyfriend’s dog got very old; we were thinking about what to do. One night, I went out to her dog’s ‘house’ in the garage. The dog was not moving, and there was an energy form about three feet over the body. I went to get my ladyfriend, to inform her that her dog was dead.
When we returned, the energy ‘ball’ was still there. It hung above the dog, until it was sure the ladyfriend knew. It was waiting – and had been waiting – for her. Then, it ‘departed’ somewhere. Whatever it was, it showed consciousness and intelligence. Not having seen humans die, up close and personal, that is my best ‘clue’ that there is more to us than the physical (including plants)…
When my husband died, I saw this “energy ball” as it rose up out of him and left in a hurry. He had cancer that killed him 6 weeks after his diagnosis and, at 43, he was quite angry about not being able to live out his life. When it happened, I screamed and ran out of the room. I will never forget it.
Justawhoaman, I am sorry about your loss. Yep, cancer is one of life’s uglies. The only “good news” there is that you got a glimpse into our eternal side…
Anyone here been listening to E Micheal Jones lately? He’s written a brief book on logos recently. Not sure how quick I can get to and through it. This all makes me want to hear him interviewed with anakephalaiosis on a podcast.
yep me. Libido Rising is his book. I am reading Libido Dominandi, with relish (an earlier book when he was way lighter on the ‘J’ elements, like Adam Waushaupt who was raised by his Catholic godfather (all that the wiki page shows) but EMJ not mentioning his ‘J’ parents. ‘J’ is also for Jesuits, who are not the good guys. EMJ seems to have wised up more recently on that count (as did Sohlzenytsyn in his Volume 2 of the Gulad Archipelago and his 200 years together).
he is on youtube a bit.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqu-4AY-501xV5iCtt7dMKQ/videos
though miles mathis did have a note or two to say about his protege, Owen Benjamin as far as bloodlines go (and OB’s missus) which is probably true, so beware the false prophets. (grains of salt). I don;t mind Paulian coverts, as long as they are transparent about where they come from (as Brother Nathaniel certainly is)
http://mileswmathis.com/shut.pdf
I think anakephalaiosis would just confuse him (leave him for dead), then again, EMJ calls the Vikings rapists and murderers ( MilesM calls them phoenecians and J people). Were not the druids wicker men basket cases? (burning people alive in giant baskets they put them in?). Disclaimer: history is written by the victors, mostly rapists and murderers called merchants and kings.
Jordon Maxwell on Rense this week took us through the Sun Gods and the 360 days of the calendar give or take 5 holi(holy) days. None of which I mind, as long as we are honest about it. Long live the Sun in it’s goldilocks range of human comfort zones.
oops., Freudian slip? Jungian Faux Pas?
Logos Rising is his book
Libido Dominandi is his other earlier book.
sheeesh.!
Bernd Heinrich’s got some excellent writing on his experience with crows.
I think Washoe the first chimp taught ASL by Roger Fouts was credited with the first original sentence of her own. “Baby in my drink” if memory serves. She referenced her care giver putting her tiny doll in her cup.
Aren’t octopi proven to have passed memories of problem solving onto next generations too?
the secret life of plants
Stevie Wonder was way ahead of his time…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayHtYGifgUQ
Doc, I posted this last night and believe it or not, about 20 minutes later, out of almost 4,200 songs on my mp3 player, the very song I posted Stevie’s “The secret life of Plants”, started playing.
This same sorta serendipity happens to me all the time. Wonder why?
This is an idea that indigenous people around the world have known for millennia. The idea that a planet might also be aware has been taken up in science fiction and fantasy stories. The real question is are our elites alive or have they ever been alive or would know if they ever were.
Well, I think the plant-based medicines works much better than their chemical counterparts. Maybe because we are both, people and plants, from the same manufacturer? I didn’t believe plant-based medicine myself before I moved to Russia. And in there most of the people usually use ONLY plant based stuff. I learned it helped very good for every sick I had in there. Now I’m back in Finland and have a lot of stress at the moment, so I asked my mother in law to bring me some good stuff from Russia with her, when she visited us. So I got this plant based medicine “Stressovit” and yes, I can say it helped me. If I would go doctor here in Finland, they would give me only some chemical antidepressants. And that stuff will mess up your brains. So yes, plants are our friends so to speak. Maybe relatives?
In Russia they also cured my wife’s aunt’s ovarian cancer what they couldn’t cure here in Finland when my mom had it. In here they said immediately that it’s uncurable cancer. My wife’s aunt has been now 15 years cancer free, it didn’t come back. So they have some stuff in Russia what really works better than in west. I’ve seen it myself. They kind of mix eastern and western medice in there. And it works. Plants play important part.
Surgery+1 line of chemotherapy and after that, a regimen of mushroom based natural medicine did the trick for her.
Paul Stamets, Fungi Perfecti, speaks about mushrooms and his mother’s healing from cancer.
Hope this helps too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WxiPf-NEDk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYILnjc_wuY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCOODjrJhRQ
got about 400 hours in on topic this year. about 30 of that on Joe Tippens. Other great search terms: Tom Seyfried, Dom D’Agostino, Travis Christofferson, Miriam Kilamian, Nasha Winters, Jane McLellan, Care Oncology. Yep seems the Russians didn’t throw out Otto Warburg’s baby with the bath water. AKA they didn’t adopt the purely genetic approach to cancer. Tippens just stumbled into a metabolic approach with a common veterinarian deworming drug that pharma seems to have known was anticancer for decades.
Seth maintained that all bits of reality have some level of consciousness – including elementary particles and quanta of energy. They all communicate and cooperate to produce the “reality” we experience – sort of like all the members of a cast and crew who like to work with a given director or writer to make a movie or play.
Since everything is ultimately energy, it stands to reason that there would be resonance and harmonics between things which have “tuned” to other things.
I also think that this conscious connection between all things fits in nicely with Bearden’s idea of the higher dimensional template.
Got to WW1, the war forged and organized by those…
w/o conscious.
to be continued.
White Rabbit
The same WW1 crew’s progenity were keenly interested in consciousness; for brainwashing/control. Many experiments and research, both overt & covert, were conducted.
W/the uncertainty principle/quantum mechanics this “crew” intensified their gaming the observer concept; for example, by experimenting w/mass observer effects.
All the collected data shows them there is more to consciousness then just the physical mind.
The cephalopods are more than interesting; there more like an intelligent alien species. More than 60% of the protein governing the neurochemistry and structure of their brain is subject to essentially continual RNA recoding[octopus/cuttlefish] – w/the potential to leapfrog some of the usual mathematics in Darwinian variation & selection.
In contrast other animals, running the spectrum from fruit flies to dolphins and us have recoding taking place in one small fraction of 1% of our DNA.
RNA/DNA = nature’s software.
When a tentacle is cut off, it acts intelligently on its own accord. There are many more fascinating attributes of this animal species that will blow your mind.
I had a friend w/a grey that cussed like no tomorrow, and my friend treated her like an intelligent human. They would sometimes curse each other back & forth, w/new variations & context. I still call him, and he shots to his noisy grey in the background/SHUT #@&% UP! Hilarious!
I recently read a non fiction book on plant intelligence and communication. I believed the author.
[I’ll have to later research to find the title/author]
When you think of it, plants we one of the first species, both in the sea & on the land. Going w/the topological metaphor; it makes sense that through time their survival would become more ensured by slowly acquiring increasing intelligent/communication skills.
Yes, civilization as a whole did loose that “je ne sais quoi” of knowing. But not all. I think some remnants of that are being hidden by a certain segment of society in basically an unbroken historical cultural lineage.
Was the devastation that occurred – the fall of man and/or the Tower of Babel moment?
Found the book:
Thus Spoke the Plant:
A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters With Plants
by Monica Gagliano and Suzanne Simard
November 13, 2018
[Used to be able to access my reviews.
Not anymore.
At least my review was still there.]
One plus one does not equal two. There is only one one and one two…the Ancients left us their legacy to those who can be trusted with the knowledge.
The same effects have been observed in water also.
Today’s post at Suspicious Observers indicates that this may indeed be the case as plants under stress emit an ultrasonic sound. A little synchronicity.
https://youtu.be/-jeYFwE4sMo
I have heard it said that the Deity is electricity. And it’s all electricity. BTW, doesn’t this pooch the case for lie detectors as useful in detecting lies? They are detecting plenty but hardly something useful for interpreting the truth.
The English are all brain, and less heart, whereas the Welsh of Albion have a thin line between fact and fantasy.
https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/special-collections/subject-guides/welsh-ballads/dafydd-iwan
1. Grass is green.
2. Grass dwells in realm of greenness.
Categorical language restrains vegetative fluidity. God’s resurrection is the growing principle. One brings forth into living, as word grows.
Green Man is very much Christ of Welsh vine-stock, as the Welsh are ancient Britons, who exposed formative Christ to Druidry.
And did those feet in ancient time.
HEART OF COURAGE
Man from Snowy River went Godspeed,
placing all his trust in four feet,
and God, the only one,
was final run,
in free rein of heart steed.
The rebus “Pyramid-Bible-Druid-Christ” has the 32-point compass in common. The 32 logoi, are 32 sectoral aspects of the 33rd logos, in the center of the sundial. (One has to be familiar with the canonical hours in the sundial, to know where the church fathers are coming from.)
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/xjnatl34jrrqo89/runic-rose2.jpg
Second Vatican Council, in 1962, changed the Latin names of the canonical hours, in an attempt to obscure their Runic origin, i.e. the 32-point compass, and papacy likewise attempted to burn Notre Dame in 2019, for the same reason.
When the British say “early in the afternoon”, it originally defines a temporal interval, from 3:00pm-3:45pm – 1/32 of the sundial – with a corresponding Runic letter. Papacy fears the Runic implication, since it suggests a leap between lives, outside papal control.
Eternal life is cyclical, not papal.
Runic logoi defined:
Incarnated life is conceived[ᚠ] into gestation[ᚢ], and when born[ᚦ], it begins respiration[ᚩ], where after it develops through experimentation[ᚱ], restrained by discipline[ᚳ], encouraged by reward[ᚷ], into learning social skills[ᚹ].
Pubertal attraction[ᚻ] is restrained[ᚾ] by culture, causing emotional distress[ᛁ] and timely recovery[ᛄ], where after it learns trade from master[ᛇ], as apprentice[ᛈ], becoming skilled worker[ᛉ], before entering marriage[ᛋ], that upholds clan.
Clan leaders define truce[ᛏ] by assembly, bringing families[ᛒ] as peace token, that attracts general folkmoot[ᛖ], developing tribal union[ᛗ], where after social unrest[ᛚ] is met, by deductive reasoning[ᛝ], that induces common principles[ᛞ], as premises to passing judgment[ᛟ].
Druidic[ᚪ] king[ᚫ] defines law enforcement, that, through violent confrontation[ᚣ], causes death[ᛠ] and victory[ᛡ], where after resettlement[ᛢ] into kingdom of heaven[ᛣ], as celestial time, creates clock[ᚸ] and calendar[ᛤ], closing lifespan by gravestone[ᛥ].
And the wheel turns, spiraling upwards toward the luminous letters.
KylE’s clock and the Runic Rose apply a character(s) of the Anglo-Saxon futhorc to each of the 32 sectors. For the first, (starting at 000degrees), 22 runes this sundial adheres to the order of the riddles; after the Ing, your order and combinations of runes are suspect.
32 divided by “peace,… composed of opposites in harmony” = ?
What rune is represented in (your answer’s) sector?
The correct sequence of the Anglo-Saxon Rune poem is found in Codex Sangallensis 878:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/29veunjeaeoo615/sword-from-stone.pdf
The Grail Runes are geometrical information: two coordinates and one perpendicular to construct a standard 4-point compass (sun cross), that is expanded into the 32-point compass, whose intervals are the vernacular sundial.
The four rivers in Genesis are also the 4-point compass, and dividing the four corners of the world, creates the 8-point compass, defining the canonical hours in the Bible, that rise, reach peak, and fall.
The diametrical oppositions, in the 32-point system, is not where one has given much thought, as yet. Obviously, there is a pedagogic contrast between forming individual corpus and collective corpus.
In the chart of “Kylie the Kangaroo”, yellow is summer principle of unification, red is autumn principle of contraction, blue is winter principle of transformation, green is spring principle of expansion – explaining the elemental vegetative year, by seed cycle.
The reason why the starting point is in the summer, is because conception is a summer principle of unification. There are small cycles within a greater cycle, and the template is the year cycle. (Yahweh is Year, and Adonai is Odin. Yahweh and Elohim are terrestrial and celestial observations of Year.)
There are several cross-references between similar looking Runic logoi, that provide additional context to the Grail Runes. The gravestone is very much a seed between lives, explaining why Maximus could have lost his tongue.
The business model of papacy is to sell flying shoes to heaven, so a Runic timekeeper of lifespan, that indicates leap between lives, is a threat to business. Theoretically, Maximus could have lost his tongue for that reason.
Being born straight under a star, is a geometrical information…
Thank You.