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

by Stephen Harrod Buhner

We are only a tiny part of the biomass of the planet. While plants make up over 90 percent of that biomass by weight, bacteria are still the dominant, and most numerous, life-forms. There are some 5 × 1030 bacteria on this Earth.

If microbial life were to disappear, that would be it—instant death for the planet.”6 The Gaian ecosystem, the self-organized system that we know as Earth, came into being with the emergence of the global bacterial community. That bacterial community still is the foundation of this world. It is Gaia.

The oldest human-discovered fossilized bacteria (and oldest biofilms) are nearly 3.5 billion years old.

And at their emergence, those self-organized bacterial groups began to modulate their environment in order to facilitate their continued existence—just as all life does. Eventually those bacterial colonies

spread throughout the entire world, eventually coming together as one tremendous superorganism. As researchers Sonnea and Mathieu put it, bacteria came to “form one global, exceedingly diversified, yet functionally unified peculiar being.”7 Once that self-organized system emerged, it began to modulate the environment at a global scale in order to keep its self-organized state intact. It began to function at a level of complexity impossible for the linear mind to grasp.

Biofilms, when closely examined, are, in essence, three-dimensional physical structures—a type of bacterial city. They are created by single or multiple bacterial species, and allow the bacteria to more easily regulate their environment, moving it toward what is optimum for their survival, much the same as our cities do for us. From one perspective, the biosphere can be understood as a complex three-dimensional biofilm that extends from deep in the Earth to the edges of space. That Gaian biofilm continually regulates the environment of the Earth; it is, for instance, what keeps the oxygen content of the atmosphere at 21 percent.

It took a half billion or more years for life to emerge; a billion years later the earliest forms of blue-green algae (which are actually bacteria) and simple fungi were generated. The first sponge-like animals emerged 650 million years ago, land plants about 500 million years ago, the first land animals 400 million years ago. The earliest human ancestors only three million years ago, human beings as we know them now emerged only 35,000 years ago, human “civilization” only four thousand years

All the complex life-forms that we see were formed through symbiogenesis, a term coined by the person who first recognized its existence, Lynn Margulis. Symbiogenesis is the formation of more complex life-forms from the union of two dissimilar, simpler ones. The mitochondria in our cells, that power our metabolism, were formerly free living bacteria, as are the chloroplasts that power those of plants. All complex life-forms are generated through just this kind of cooperative joining, over long evolutionary time, with information built upon information, complexity always increasing in order to more fully stabilize the system.

It is now clear that genetic material has moved during evolution from species to species by means of retroviruses and other transposable particles. . . . What is so extraordinary in its implications for evolution is that transposition can occur between forms of life that are quite different,

Horizontal gene transfer between all life-forms on this planet, often through mosquito bites which transmit viruses in and out of organisms, is, along with symbiogenesis, one of the main driving forces in genetic innovation. We contain within ourselves the DNA of plants, insects, and bacteria, and viruses. We are, in fact, the “other” that we have been trying to kill.

For most people, the recognition that we are at root simply bacteria, morphed through symbiogenesis into a more complex form in order to fulfill stabilizing functions within the self-organized Earth ecosystem, truly is a filthy lesson.

Studies have found that human reductions in the diverse plant populations that normally occur in healthy ecosystems can reduce the unique bacterial populations that grow on those plants, ultimately reducing cloud cover and rain over that region. It is not just the rain forest that is important to rain.

Self-organized systems, including ourselves, operate at their core exactly as Anthony Trewavas described plants as operating: “There is no unique separate response to each signal in this complex [of informational inflows] but merely a response issued from an integration of all environmental and internal information.”29 In other words, the organism takes in all the incoming data simultaneously as it occurs and integrates it as one coherent whole then crafts a response, exactly as a juggler does with his balls. Editor:

There is no way that linear processes could be used to generate the increasingly complex innovations on form and behavior that would stabilize homeodynamis. Top-down control here just doesn’t work. Just as we cannot, with linear thinking, control the individual responses and functions of our pancreas, our liver, the analysis by our white blood cells of a pathogenic microbe

Bifurcations then occur

This is why linear approaches, over the short run, appear to work. But, sometimes, if the threat to self-organization is severe enough, if a tipping point is reached, the system responds as a whole by significantly altering its functional state in a short period of time. A phase change occurs. This is what James Lovelock and others are afraid of with the current problems of human/Earth interactions. The Earth can shift its state from one where our life-form can survive to one where we cannot in a very short period of time. It’s done it before.

The larger Gaian system generates an impulse in its organisms to behave in certain ways. In essence the many types of possible behavioral states inherent in the various organisms of Earth are emergent behaviors of the self-organized system. And this includes the capacity for expanding gating channels And rather than a top-down approach, the organisms themselves are left to choose their own self-generated responses to environmental perturbation based on their own, self-intuited genius. They are allowed—even stimulated—to innovate. This results in tremendous adaptability in the system as each part can intelligently create its own response to perturbations in the part of the ecosystem that is its domain.

Serotonin, and these kinds of receptors, are not limited to human beings however. They are ubiquitous throughout the living systems of the planet: in animals, insects, and plants. In them, they play similar roles.

As gating channels open more widely in response to serotonin, the amount of incoming visual data increases, visual sensitivity increases, and the cross-correlation and analysis of the larger data stream increases as well.

And 5-HT2a receptors open sensory gating channels more widely in order to bring more sensory data to conscious awareness, thus allowing a greater range of behavioral response—responses outside normal habituated parameters.

As self-organized biological organisms such as plants, fungi, insects, and animals congregate in a specific region, they form an ecorange or even an ecozone (much larger).

In grassland ecoranges and zones both the grass and the psilocybe act as what are called “strong interactors.” That is, they are in essence acting as keystone species around which the entire ecorange is oriented. The other plants in the system are considered to be “weak” interactors.

9 O’Gorman and Emmerson conducted experiments where they removed strong interactors from complex ecosystems and found, not surprisingly, that it “produced a dramatic trophic cascade” in the system. That is, the system immediately experienced a phase change, going from a state of high complexity to one much less sophisticated.

In other words, while the keystone species remain relatively stable, the weak interactors are in constant flux around them, various plants moving in and out of the ecosystem as the environment in which the system is located changes its nature and needs.

“Crucially, when strong interactors were present in the community without a sufficient number of weakly interacting species around them” the ecosystem destabilized.12 Weak interactor loss led to “reductions in temporal and spacial stability of ecosystem process rates, community diversity, and resistance.”

For example, most keystone species, if not all of them, need a weak attractor, called a nurse plant, to begin growing first in a new location before the keystone species can successfully grow.

There is a continuous flow of interactive communications in ecosystems, each tiny part a response to the ever-living, never-stopping, always-flowing communications that are coming from all the tightly coupled members of that ecosystem and the environment in which it all is embedded. There is a language in the world, much older than our own, ours is only a reflection of that older language, our “take” on it, our innovation and that language, as it moves through ecosystems, gives those ecosystems a shape unique to the communication occurring in that location.

To which Bateson adds . . . The shapes of animals and plants are transforms of messages. Language itself is a form of communication. The structure of the input must contain an analogue of grammar because all anatomy is a transform of message material, which must be contextually shaped.

Serotonergic neurognostics generate, or perhaps more accurately, regenerate, the natural childlike feelings of empathy, the direct experience of the personhood of the nonhuman other, by altering sensory gating in important ways. They alter the function of the frontal cortices, the

Such boundary thinning is crucial. For you begin then to see other life-forms from their point of view. In consequence, increased empathy is inevitable. This has deep implications for ecosystem functioning and health.

Only if we can learn to see the other members of the Earth community from their point of view—to stand where they stand—and feel an empathy with their life can we begin to find a path to sustainable habitation of this planet.

Kary Mullis, the Nobel laureate and biochemist, who credited LSD with helping him develop DNA amplification technology, that is the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique that is used in laboratories throughout the world to more quickly identify microorganisms.

All organisms are, in fact, forms, or more accurately transforms, of environment themselves. They are so tightly coupled with the field from which they emerged that it is not possible, with any accuracy, to view them in isolation from that field. Doing so immediately creates an experiential and interpretational disjunct between self and world.

Any behavioral actions taken that are based on the mistaken experience that organisms are not environment, that environment is background and organisms foreground, results in environmental perturbations that will disturb the homeodynamis of the Gaian system.

The recognition that life shapes environment which then shapes life which then shapes environment destroys the foundation of the neo-Darwinian system. It begins to destroy the whole concept of cause and effect. Evolution begins to take on quantum characteristics; linear thinking is no longer foundational.

As Masanobu Fukuoka put it . . . Nature is a fluid entity that changes from moment to moment. Man is unable to grasp the essence of something because the true form of nature leaves nowhere to be grasped.

The opening of sensory gating channels more widely leads to a thinning of the boundary between self and nonself. It enables the movement of consciousness from a static sense of us being in a place to our immersion in a scenario. It allows immersion within the metaphysical background of the world.

allows us to experience, first hand, that there is no difference between background and foreground, that both are the same thing.

Every new object, clearly seen, opens up a new organ of perception in us. GOETHE

A shift in consciousness has occurred. though we usually just call it reading During that shift, when we become immersed in story, a unique alteration in sensory gating channels occurs. The gating of the feeling sense is no longer narrow; it opens more widely—and this is crucial to the art, to the story coming alive inside us. There is a reason why gating opens more widely (and the more accomplished the writer, the more widely it opens). It happens because writers learn, one way or another, to combine the visual and feeling senses into one unique sensory medium.

This intentional blending of the visual description of a thing and its secret kinesis is the power that hides inside good writing.

this dream state, where the story literally becomes real, is what Goethe called the “exact sensory imagination” it’s the tool he used to enter the dreaming of Earth to better understand the movements of Gaia

Part of how writers create this effect is by dropping into a kind of dream themselves as they write. We enter a dream when we read because writing itself is a special kind of dreaming.

It is dreaming developed into a particular kind of art. It is because writing begins as a dream in an altered state of consciousness that i...

Writing that emerges out of that dreaming state produces an altered state of consciousness in the reader.

The sound you do not hear but see, and the visual you cannot see but hear, is the work. 11 Or as the composer Gustav Mahler put it, “What is best in music is not to be found within the notes.”

The musician enters a dream state and the music comes alive in a special way—it flows through the musician from some other place, into this world, and into the listeners.

the indigenous peoples of America insisted that every plant had its own song and those who knew the song could then evoke the deeper medicine of the plant

The song itself is an invisible thing, something very difficult to find with the linear mind. The sheet music is only a map of the song, and not a very good map at that just as a book is only a map of the story it tells.

As Gustav Mahler once put it . . . If a composer could say what he had to say in words, he would not bother trying to say it in music.