Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

by Stephen Harrod Buhner

In many respects it is a manual for becoming a nondomesticated explorer of the natural world, something that used to be called, long ago, a natural philosopher, what might now be called a wild scientist as opposed to a domesticated one.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. So, this book is about how to actually think differently, the processes involved, and how they will alter your perceptual frame if you use them.

It then urges you to do one thing: whatever the hell it is that you think you should do in response. It is in your own individual genius that the answers lie, not in the pronouncements of experts who have no conception of the local environment in which you live every day of your life.

Letting the experts run things is how we got into this m...

‘Because the Nazis taught me this: There is a Hitler inside each of us and if we do not heal the Hitler inside of ourselves, then the violence, it will never stop.’”

when I feel some rage inside me wanting to do harm because I feel so helpless that I can find no other thing to do, that teaching, in the depths of me, rises up again into awareness and I see that young woman in Majdanek and I feel her eyes looking into me and I hear Elisabeth’s voice once more and I begin to think outside the box again.

There is a difference I learned, long ago, between schooling and education. Do you feel it now, in the room with you?

I was never able to find it in the analysis of chemicals or in degree programs or in any of my schools. But sometimes I find it in the soft flutter of butterflies, in the wildness of plants growing undomesticated in a forest clearing, in the laughter and running of young children, their hair flowing in the wind, and sometimes, sometimes I find it in the words of teachers who...

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. ALBERT EINSTEIN

Then, for some reason that day, my internal world quieted in a way I had never before experienced. I became aware of a special quality to the sounds in the room.

Every tiny noise emerging in that magical silence took on, itself, a special kind of sound, a special kind of meaning.

The light, filtering in from the windows, was charged with a quality I had never seen before; it seemed to glow with a special light of its own. A shimmering luminescence came from inside it, as if I were seeing a deeper form of

Time itself had changed, as if it were suspended—like the dust motes in the air. There was so much time and it was so slow I could take as long as I needed to sense each and every thing. And what is more, I felt companioned. Companioned by everything in that room: the sunlight, the sounds, the smells, the desk, the lamp, the papers and pens, the curtains, the chairs, every physical object. Everything had taken on a kind of intelligent awareness and caring and each and every thing in that room was gently companioning me in that single, suspended moment in time.

I had entered some, heretofore unknown, magical world, a world that lies underneath and behind the one that most of us see every day.

Everything seemed to have somehow become more itself.

we grow away from something essential to our humanness, to our habitation of this world. We can no longer see or feel what is within the surface sensory inputs that we receive; we can no longer experience the luminous with which we are surrounded.

We have lost, as James Hillman once put it, the response of the heart to what is presented to the senses.

Gottfried Benn captured this state of being, our almost fanatical orientation toward surfaces, in his observation that, “[for those in the West,] reality is simply raw material, but its...

Art—real art—connects artists, and their art, and those who experience their art, to the metaphysical background of the world, to the imaginal world that lies deep within the physical.

Someplace deep inside, we remain children, those younger parts of ourselves woven into our being just as the rings of trees—and their earlier stages of growth—are still within them. These parts remain accessible within us, natural expressions of our aliveness. All of us have the capacity to free those parts—and their unique perceptual experiences of the world. All of us still have the capacity for a deeper kind of perception.

The pressure to abandon the metaphysical background of the physical world is immense.

when we open those perceptual doors to see deeper into the world, we begin to enter another world entirely; we begin to leave the merely human world behind; we begin to see from the world’s point of view.

You must abandon your preconceptions and travel into the world itself, as it really is, and find out for yourself what is true, and find, as well, just what you, yourself, are meant to do in this lifetime. And to do that, to really see deeply into the world, means using perceptual capacities that our culture habitually denies.

Because all life-forms, irrespective of their nature, must, to survive, have a sense of not me, they all have a sense of self, they are in fact self-aware. Because all life-forms, irrespective of their nature, must, to survive, be able to analyze the nature of the not me that approaches them and, further, must be able to determine its intent, and further, be able to craft a response to that intent, all life-forms are, by definition, intelligent. Because all life-forms have to be able to determine the intent of the not me that approaches them, they also have to be able to determine meaning. In other words, all living organisms can not only process data, they also engage in a search for meaning, an analysis that runs much deeper than linear cause and effect. Thus, three capacities—self-awareness, intelligence, and the search for meaning—that have (erroneously) been ascribed as belonging only to human beings, are in fact general conditions of every living organism.

Most of your (conscious) attention was on reading this book, not on the visual field in which you sat immersed as you were reading it.

as you became immersed in this book, you no longer saw the words as a visual input. You’d left that surface orientation behind. You began, then, to work with, and experience, the meanings that these words are only the containers for.

into your experience came the sound of my voice and the feelings that accompany the meanings that these words have inside them.

You were, until I woke you from it, engaged in a form of dreaming.

A special kind of dreaming, central to everything this book is about, and one that no one had t...

They possess what are called sensory gating channels—or as William Blake and Aldous Huxley more comprehensively described the phenomenon, we all have within us the doors of perception.

These deeper parts of us allow sensory inputs to touch our consciousness only if they determine those inputs are important enough.

They weigh a large variety of factors to gauge relevance; this includes such things as the intensity of the sensory inflow, its novelty, the degree of contrast between a sensory stimulus and its sensory background, and its rarity.

One of the ways that your neural system facilitates this process is through the near-immediate creation and release of specific neurotransmitters. These affect gating levels and processes in the central nervous system and brain.

This is what Goethe was talking about when he said that Every new object, clearly seen, opens up a new organ of perception in us. Using that part of the brain as a primary sensing organ, actively extending its gating parameters, literally remakes it. More neurons form, the brain region becomes more plastic; it becomes highly sensitive to the lightest touch of sensory inflows. A new organ of perception emerges that can be used to consciously perceive tiny modulations of the meanings held within a much larger spectrum of the sensory modality being used.

People with very open P50 channels commonly report being “flooded with sound” or hearing “everything at once.” In other words, the unconscious mechanism that filters sound lets more through, so much so that, in some cases, the people exist in a sea of sounds that tend to overwhelm consciousness. This is often complicated by the fact that, commonly, they also have more open N100 channels.

“Inappropriate orienting to irrelevant stimuli,” by the way, is a cultural definition, not a functional one. In other words, those with significantly open sensory gating channels are orienting themselves to sensory inputs that most other people do not notice and attributing importance to the meanings in those sensory inputs that other people do not.

Few of those that treat the condition actually have access to the metaphysical background of the world themselves or even understand what access to that world means. In consequence, not only are the interpretations by “schizophrenics” of their meaning inflows “crazy,” so are the informational interventions by their caretakers.

In cultures that recognize the importance of this capacity, this group of people are trained to use their enhanced perceptual capacities for the benefit of the group. there would then be many more holy people among us

Schizophrenic states, in fact, share a large number of common features with the experiential states generated by hallucinogens indicating that schizophrenia is not in fact an abnormal state but is itself an altered state of consciousness.

Studies have found that one-fourth of “healthy” individuals in every Western population commonly report sensory inundation, difficulty in stimulus filtering (stimulus overinclusion), and problems with orienting to inappropriate stimuli.

During early life, the sensory gating channels in every individual in every species find their own “default” setting.

Among gifted children the incidence of more widely open sensory gating channels is much higher, as high as 35 percent according to some.

While all gating narrows as we age, in each of us some gating channels remain more open than others.

Because newborns have minimal gating, they tend to experience everything simultaneously as it happens. They take in nearly all the field of sensory inflows in which they exist, and from every sensory modality. They are literally immersed in a sea of meaning-filled sensory inputs.

In other words, they are working with the metaphysical background of things directly, without prejudice.

Or, as Eric Berne once described it . . . A little boy sees and hears birds with delight. Then the “good father” comes along and feels he should “share” the experience and help his son “develop.” He says: “That’s a jay, and this is a sparrow.” The moment the little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.

But most of the members of the human race have lost the capacity to be painters, poets, or musicians, and are not left the option of seeing and hearing directly even if they can afford to; they must get it secondhand.

Very young children don’t have the intermediary of language—they don’t have a sign in place of the thing. They “see and hear in the old way.”

And that is what this book is about. It is recovering this ability, and using it intentionally, to interact with the metaphysical background of the world. It is about becoming aware. It is about giving up getting things “secondhand.”

The world is still filled with wonder and magic; they still see with glittering eyes. It is, in part, their openness to the touch of the world upon them, their sense of the livingness of everything they encounter, that so strongly affects all of us who encounter them.