Experiments show that plants retain a connection with their carers constantly, even at great distance, and probably instantaneously.
From The Secret Life of Plants, by Peter Tompkins
In another series of observations, Backster noted that a special union or bond of affinity appeared to be created between a plant and its keeper, unaffected by distance. With the use of synchronized stopwatches, Backster was able to note that his plants continued to react to his thought and attention from the next room, from down the hall, even from several buildings away. Back from a fifteen-mile trip to New Jersey, Backster was able to establish that his plants had perked up and shown definite and positive signs of response—whether it was relief or welcome he could not tell—at the very moment he had decided to return to New York.
When Backster was away on a lecture tour and talked about his initial 1966 observation, showing a slide of the original dracaena, the plant, back in his office, would show a reaction on the chart at the very time he projected the slide.
Once attuned to a particular person, plants appeared to be able to maintain a link with that person, no matter where he went, even among thousands of people. On New Year’s Eve in New York City, Backster went out into the bedlam of Times Square armed with a notebook and stopwatch. Mingling with the crowd, he noted his various actions, such as walking, running, going underground by way of subway stairs, nearly getting run over, and having a mild fracas with a news vendor. Back at the lab, he found that each of three plants, monitored independently, showed similar reactions to his slight emotional adventures.
To see if he could get a reaction from plants at a much greater distance, Backster experimented with a female friend to establish whether her plants remained attuned to her on a seven hundred mile plane ride across the United States. From synchronized clocks they found a definite reaction from the plants to the friend’s emotional stress each time the plane touched down for its landing.
To test a plant’s reaction at still greater distances, even millions of miles, to see if space is a limit to the “primary perception” of his plants, Backster would like the Mars probers to place a plant with a galvanometer on or near that planet so as to check by telemeter the plant’s reaction to emotional changes in its caretaker at ground control on earth.
Since “telemetered” radio or TV signals traveling via electromagnetic waves at the speed of light take between six and six and one-half minutes to reach Mars and as many to return to Earth, the question was whether an emotional signal from an earthbound human would reach Mars faster than an electromagnetic wave or, as Backster suspects, the very instant it was sent. Were the round-trip time for a telemetered message to be cut in half it would indicate that mental or emotional messages operate outside time as we conceive it, and beyond the electromagnetic spectrum.
“We keep hearing about non-time-consuming communication from Eastern philosophic sources,” says Backster. “They tell us that the universe is in balance; if it happens to go out of balance someplace, you can’t wait a hundred light-years for the imbalance to be detected and corrected. This non-time-consuming communication, this oneness among all living things, could be the answer.”
Backster has no idea what kind of energy wave may carry man’s thoughts or internal feelings to a plant. He has tried to screen a plant by placing it in a Faraday cage as well as in a lead container. Neither shield appeared in any way to block or jam the communication channel linking the plant to the human being. The carrier-wave equivalent, whatever it might be, Backster concluded, must somehow operate beyond the electromagnetic spectrum. It also appeared to operate from the macrocosm down to the microcosm.
One day when Backster happened to cut his finger and dabbed it with iodine, the plant that was being monitored on the polygraph immediately reacted, apparently to the death of some cells in Backster’s finger. Though it might have been reacting to his emotional state at the sight of his own blood, or to the stinging of the iodine, Backster soon found a recognizable pattern in the graph whenever a plant was witnessing the death of some living tissue.
Could the plant, Backster wondered, be sensitive on a cellular level all the way down to the death of individual cells in its environment?
On another occasion the typical graph appeared as Backster was preparing to eat a cup of yogurt. This puzzled him till he realized there was a chemical preservative in the jam he was mixing into the yogurt that was terminating some of the live yogurt bacilli. Another inexplicable pattern on the chart was finally explained when it was realized the plants were reacting to hot water being poured down the drain, which was killing bacteria in the sink.
Excerpt From: “The Secret Life of Plants: A Fascinating Account of the Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Relations Between Plants and Man” by Peter Tompkins. Scribd.
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