The Plants Respond - An Interview With Cleve Backster

[ktlight]

"Sometimes it happens that a person can name the exact moment when his or her life changed irrevocably. For Cleve Backster, it was early in the morning of February 2, 1966, at thirteen minutes, fifty-five seconds into a polygraph test he was administering. Backster, a leading polygraph expert whose Backster Zone Comparison Test is the worldwide standard for lie detection, had at that moment threatened his test subject’s well-being. The subject had responded electrochemically to his threat.

The subject was a plant.

Since then, Backster has conducted hundreds of experiments demonstrating not only that plants respond to our emotions and intents, but so do severed leaves, eggs (fertilized or not), yogurt, and human cell samples. He’s found, for example, that white cells taken from a person’s mouth and placed in a test tube still respond electrochemically to the donor’s emotional states, even when the donor is out of the room, out of the building, or out of the state.

I first read about Backster’s work when I was a kid. His observations verified an understanding I had then, an understanding not even a degree in physics could later eradicate: that the world is alive and sentient.

I spoke with Backster in San Diego, thirty-one years and twenty-two days after his original observation, and a full continent away from the office on Times Square in New York City where he had once worked and lived. Before we began, he placed some yogurt into a sterilized test tube, inserted two gold electrodes, and turned on the recording chart. I was excited, yet dubious. We began to talk, and the pen wriggled up and down. Then, just as I took in my breath prior to disagreeing with something he’d said, the pen seemed to lurch. But did it really jump, or was I only seeing what I wanted to see?

At one point, while Backster was out of the room, I tried to muster up some anger by thinking of clear-cut forests and the politicians who sanction them, of abused children and their abusers. But the line depicting the electrochemical response of the yogurt remained perfectly flat. Perhaps the yogurt wasn’t interested in me. Losing interest myself, I began to wander around the lab. My eyes fell on a calendar, which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be an advertisement for a shipping company. I felt a sudden surge of anger at the ubiquity of advertising. Then I realized — a spontaneous emotion! I dashed over to the chart, and saw on it a sudden spike apparently corresponding to the moment I'd seen the ad.

When Backster returned, I continued the interview, still excited, and perhaps a little less skeptical."

Now go to the link to read the interview:

http://thesunmagazine.org/archives/1882

[Qba]

It's also mentioned and well described by David Wilcock in "The Source Field Investigations".
Highly reccomended book by the way.

[grannyfranny100]

There have been writers claiming that some ET craft have consciousness and interact with the pilot's brain. Hmm, Cleve Backster may be on the right track.

[Hervé]

Yeah-yeah... took Backster a few years to catch up on this one:


Dr Hubbard's experiments soon came to the attention of Garden News, to which publication he revealed, gardener to gardener, his conviction that plants felt pain. He demonstrated by connecting an E-meter to a geranium with crocodile clips, tearing off its leaves and showing how the needle of the E-meter oscillated as he did so. The Garden News correspondent was enormously excited and wrote a story under the sensational headline 'PLANTS DO WORRY AND FEEL PAIN', describing Hubbard as a 'revolutionary horticultural scientist'.[Garden News, 18 December 1959]


http://www.xenu.net/archive/books/bfm/tomato.jpg
Hubbard as 'revolutionary horticultural scientist', proving that plants can feel pain. (Rex Features Ltd)


It was not long before television and Fleet Street reporters were beating a path to Saint Hill Manor demanding to interview Hubbard about his novel theories. Always pleased to help the gentlemen of the press, he was memorably photographed looking compassionately at a tomato jabbed by probes attached to an E-meter - a picture that eventually found its way into Newsweek magazine, causing a good deal of harmless merriment at his expense. Alan Whicker, a well-known British television interviewer, did his best to make Hubbard look like a crank, but Hubbard contrived to come across as a rather likeable and confident personality. When Whicker moved in for the kill, sarcastically inquiring if rose pruning should be stopped lest it caused pain and anxiety, Hubbard neatly side-stepped the question and drew a parallel with an essential life-preserving medical operation on a human being. He might have whacky ideas, Whicker discovered, but he was certainly no fool.

Scientologists around the world could have been forgiven for wondering what their beloved leader was up to, but an explanation was soon forthcoming. The purpose of Ron's experiments, they were told, was to 'reform the world's food supply'. He had already produced 'ever-bearing tomato plants and sweetcorn plants sufficiently impressive to startle British newspapers into front-page stories about this new wizardry'.[A Piece of Blue Sky, Jon Atack, 1992]

[...]One was taken ridiculously... not the other one... why?

[birddog]

Grannygranny100 wrote:

"There have been writers claiming that some ET craft have consciousness and interact with the pilot's brain. "

I believe most, if not all have this characteristic. One has to be telepathic, or have artificial telepathy.

[Bill Ryan]

Bumping this thread by copying this post by norman on the Nuggets of Truth thread:
(https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?120891-Nuggets-of-Truth&p=1648260&viewfull=1#post1648260)
:flower::flower::flower::flower::flower:


https://t.me/SourceLoveLight/15481
SourceLoveLight/15481

[rgray222]

This is about trees, but it does show (even prove) that the interconnectivity of all living substances is not debatable.

Do Trees Talk to Each Other?
A controversial German forester says yes, and his ideas are shaking up the scientific world

I’m walking in the Eifel Mountains in western Germany, through cathedral-like groves of oak and beech, and there’s a strange unmoored feeling of entering a fairy tale. The trees have become vibrantly alive and charged with wonder. They’re communicating with one another, for starters. They’re involved in tremendous struggles and death-defying dramas. To reach enormousness, they depend on a complicated web of relationships, alliances and kinship networks.

Wise old mother trees feed their saplings with liquid sugar and warn the neighbors when danger approaches. Reckless youngsters take foolhardy risks with leaf-shedding, light-chasing and excessive drinking, and usually pay with their lives. Crown princes wait for the old monarchs to fall, so they can take their place in the full glory of sunlight. It’s all happening in the ultra-slow motion that is tree time, so that what we see is a freeze-frame of the action.

https://th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com/aYKhXUETBC-sHO860p9HCPHMSN4=/fit-in/1072x0/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/27/7e/277e16f8-73d1-4f44-b82a-73f8b879ca62/mar2018_a03_talkingtrees.jpg

My guide here is a kind of tree whisperer. Peter Wohlleben, a German forester and author, has a rare understanding of the inner life of trees, and is able to describe it in accessible, evocative language. He stands very tall and straight, like the trees he most admires, and on this cold, clear morning, the blue of his eyes precisely matches the blue of the sky. Wohlleben has devoted his life to the study and care of trees. He manages this forest as a nature reserve, and lives with his wife, Miriam, in a rustic cabin near the remote village of Hümmel.

Now, at the age of 53, he has become an unlikely publishing sensation. His book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, written at his wife’s insistence, sold more than 800,000 copies in Germany, and has now hit the best-seller lists in 11 other countries, including the United States and Canada. (Wohlleben has turned his attention to other living things as well, in his Inner Life of Animals, newly issued in translation.)

A revolution has been taking place in the scientific understanding of trees, and Wohlleben is the first writer to convey its amazements to a general audience. The latest scientific studies, conducted at well-respected universities in Germany and around the world, confirm what he has long suspected from close observation in this forest: Trees are far more alert, social, sophisticated—and even intelligent—than we thought.

With his big green boots crunching through fresh snow, and a dewdrop catching sunlight on the tip of his long nose, Wohlleben takes me to two massive beech trees growing next to each other. He points up at their skeletal winter crowns, which appear careful not to encroach into each other’s space. “These two are old friends,” he says. “They are very considerate in sharing the sunlight, and their root systems are closely connected. In cases like this, when one dies, the other usually dies soon afterward, because they are dependent on each other.”

Since Darwin, we have generally thought of trees as striving, disconnected loners, competing for water, nutrients and sunlight, with the winners shading out the losers and sucking them dry. The timber industry in particular sees forests as wood-producing systems and battlegrounds for survival of the fittest.

There is now a substantial body of scientific evidence that refutes that idea. It shows instead that trees of the same species are communal, and will often form alliances with trees of other species. Forest trees have evolved to live in cooperative, interdependent relationships, maintained by communication and a collective intelligence similar to an insect colony. These soaring columns of living wood draw the eye upward to their outspreading crowns, but the real action is taking place underground, just a few inches below our feet.

“Some are calling it the ‘wood-wide web,’” says Wohlleben in German-accented English. “All the trees here, and in every forest that is not too damaged, are connected to each other through underground fungal networks. Trees share water and nutrients through the networks, and also use them to communicate. They send distress signals about drought and disease, for example, or insect attacks, and other trees alter their behavior when they receive these messages.”

Scientists call these mycorrhizal networks. The fine, hairlike root tips of trees join together with microscopic fungal filaments to form the basic links of the network, which appears to operate as a symbiotic relationship between trees and fungi, or perhaps an economic exchange. As a kind of fee for services, the fungi consume about 30 percent of the sugar that trees photosynthesize from sunlight. The sugar is what fuels the fungi, as they scavenge the soil for nitrogen, phosphorus and other mineral nutrients, which are then absorbed and consumed by the trees.

Your will find the rest of this article at the Smithsonian Magazine (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering-trees-180968084/), it is a fairly lengthy article but it's extremely interesting.