The Man Who Talked to Plants: The Visionary Research of Cleve Backster & Consciousness At the Cellular Level — Interconnected (Oneness) of All Things

(Stillness in the Storm Editor) The notion that consciousness is fundamental to the universe is well established in some circles while being completely dismissed in “official science.” 

From a discernment perspective, it is impossible to understand reality as a whole if one disregards aspects of it—which is what many materialist scientists have fallaciously done. It is a logical error to discount observation based purely on a set of logical assumptions. Someone can’t recognize or see what something is if they have blinded themselves from within via a dogmatic belief. 

When scientists attempted to verify the observations of Cleve Backster, they designed experiments that did not adequately account for all factors; therefore they could not replicate his findings. And to those who cannot comprehend or understand how science works—outsiders who rely on “experts” to tell them what is real—they will dismiss any claim because the priesthood of science could not verify it. 

In other words, we who are trying to understand the world around us should not rest our beliefs purely on the statements of others, even so-called experts. We should remain open-minded, which is another way of saying maintaining a healthy amount of doubt.

When we dismiss a claim or theory because evidence has not been gathered yet (closing our minds to the possibility it is real), this is known as the argument from ignorance fallacy, which Wikipedia has a good description of:

Argument from ignorance (from Latin: argumentum ad ignorantiam), also known as appeal to ignorance (in which ignorance represents “a lack of contrary evidence”), is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proved false (or vice versa). This represents a type of false dichotomy in that it excludes a third option, which is that: there may have been an insufficient investigation, and therefore there is insufficient information to prove the proposition be either true or false. Nor does it allow the admission that the choices may in fact not be two (true or false), but may be as many as four, 

1. true
2. false
3. unknown between true or false
4. being unknowable (among the first three). (Source)

What this means is that just because evidence has not been gathered (lack of evidence) there is not also a lack of existence. Thus, one cannot positively confirm something does not exist purely because it hasn’t been seen yet. 

Argument from ignorance fallacies is what debunkers of Backsters work have done, claiming that because “we can’t replicate his observations” there is nothing happening. Clearly a logical fallacy. 

“The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.” ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

This logical fallacy is pandemic in our world, as many so-called skeptics presume because they have not observed something, nor has officialdom, it doesn’t exist at all. But as the author of the second article in this post state, there are many things we each subjectively experience that science today cannot verify with experimental data—like the dynamics of emotional states and how they come about. 

So in our quest to discern fact from fiction and understand how all things properly relate to each other, we should avoid the argument from ignorance fallacy—one of many logical fallacies used by the undiscerning. 

In short, keeping an open mind is crucial, which is another way of saying that to dismiss something as false without evidence to confirm that assertion, is a close-minded stance based on ignorance, not a real or valid form of discernment. 

Positive evidence of what something is enables a valid claim of disproof to be made, otherwise dismissing a premise has no basis in fact (reality) and is merely an unfounded conjecture.

Source – Consciousness Life Style Mag

by Justing Faerman, 2014

When you hook plants up to a lie detector machine, interesting things are bound to happen. And they certainly did for Cleve Backster on the morning of February 2, 1966. Backster was a former CIA agent, FBI trainer and world-renowned polygraph expert who had a curious and playful streak in him that fateful morning. He decided to connect his polygraph machine to a Dracaena plant sitting in the room to see if he could get a reading when he subjected the plant to stress. He had decided to light a match with the intent of burning a leaf, but that thought was as far as he got. Suddenly the polygraph machine came alive and registered the plant reacting to his mischievous thoughts. Astounded and convinced the plant was able to read his intention, Backster would spend the rest of his life studying the ability of plants to communicate with and read their environments, particularly their spontaneous reactions to living things.

“A CIA agent turned researcher made one of the most startling and significant discoveries of the 21st century”

His conclusion? Plants communicated telepathically—a concept which he called primary perception. Backster’s work was inspired in part by the research of physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose, who used a specially designed, extremely sensitive machine to measure plant movements in response to various stimuli and in the process demonstrated that plants have the ability to feel. From the results of his extensive research, he hypothesized that plants can feel pain, understand affection and demonstrate other sensory abilities (although by different mechanisms than humans), which became the subject matter of two books written in 1902 and 1926. Backster’s polygraph work seemed to confirm Bose’s findings, leading him to propose a method by which plants communicate—one that he likened conceptually to ESP.

Related Interconnected Nature, Scientific Evidence of Empathy in Animals: Mice Smell and Share Each Other’s Pain

When Backster’s work originally gained public visibility it was quickly criticized by the scientific community for lack of repeatability. Backster claimed this was because plants were quite sophisticated and only reacted to authentic, emotionally backed intent, whereas the researchers who replicated his experiments lacked that factor in the cold, mechanical nature of scientific experimentation. Backster asserted that he was more of an observer in his methodologies. Nonetheless, Bose’s work clearly demonstrated there was more going on than was suspected by either party.

Image Source. Graph from one of Backster’s studies.

For decades Backster, along with his supporters, and the larger academic community we’re locked in disagreement and little progress was made.

“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. Human cells, too, have this primary-perception capability, but somehow it’s gotten lost at the conscious level. Or perhaps we never had such a talent,” said Backster when asked to comment on his work recent interview.

“I suspect that when a person is spiritually advanced enough to handle such perceptions, she or he will become properly tuned in. Until then it might be best not to be tuned in, because of the damage we could cause by mishandling the received information.”

However, a new study published recently in the scientific journal Biomed Central Ecology may have finally tipped the scale in Backster and Bose’s favor. The research demonstrates evidence that plants can indeed communicate with each other, and they do so by using nano-mechanical sound waves.

“We have previously suggested that acoustic signals may offer such a mechanism for mediating plant-plant relationships,” the authors explained in their conclusion. They propose that these acoustic or vibrational signals are produced by a biochemical process within the plant’s cells and are used to communicate both spatial and environmental information to each other.

It is highly likely that this is what Cleve Backster detected nearly fifty years earlier on his rudimentary polygraph tests. Although the exact mechanism is still being explored, the fact remains that plants are sensitive to extremely subtle vibrations produced by any number of environmental stimuli from music to other sentient beings—even thoughts.

This article originally appears in the Fall 2014 Issue of Conscious Lifestyle Magazine. You can download a copy of this issue by clicking here or subscribe by clicking here

About The Author

Justin Faerman is the Co-founder of Conscious Lifestyle Magazine.

Source – Weiler Psi blog

Consciousness At the Cellular Level: The Experiments of Cleve Backster

Image Source.