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

by Stephen Harrod Buhner

For the Earth lives in a dream.

The greater part of all self-organized systems exist in a state of deep dreaming, what we, in our hubris, tend to call an unconscious state.

A human being is actually a giant swarm. Or more precisely, it’s a swarm of swarms, because each organ—blood, liver, kidneys—is a separate swarm. What we refer to as a body is really the combination of all these organ swarms. . . . It turns out that a lot of processing occurs at the level of the organs.

is only because most of our self remains unconscious, that it dreams, that we exist at all.

The Earth, as it generates new form, is, again, in the same kind of dream state as we are when we write or make songs or read a book or hear a story or drop deep into analogical thinking and begin to follow golden threads. The Earth is just like us . . . only more so.

The Earth initiates continual alterations in the form and behavior of everything in the system in order to maintain optimum self-organizational homeodynamis.

Immersed in our short lives, we can perceive in our lifetime perhaps only a single note or two of a Gaian symphony that has been playing for eons. We hear the note but cannot hear the entire symphony. Because of that the note appears to be meaningless. To

All open, nonlinear, self-organized systems immediately begin to oscillate at that moment of self-organization. What that oscillation is, is the movement of the system around its point of equilibrium, its threshold. On one side is chaos, on the other self-organization.

That is what music is. These oscillatory patterns are not random; there are patterns within them. They are in fact songs, possessing melody, movement, communicative interiority. They speak of the life of the self-organized system, of how it feels, of the interior struggles it undergoes and the impact of the exterior world upon it, and its responses to those struggles, those touches.

These songs are a multidimensional representation of the self-organized biological systems that generate them. As ethnobotanist Kathleen Harrison remarks about the pervasiveness of the medicinal plant songs in the Americas . . .

Everything has a song. And that song is a communicatory description of the livingness of that self-organized entity. It is a sonic representation of the nonlinearity of every life-form, of the form and behavior that is altering itself continuously.

The song is a map of the interaction of that system with both its interior and exterior worlds, the shape of the thing as it has emerged in the field in which it has taken root. And its melody alters from moment to moment as the field shape changes in response to incoming touches (interoceptive or exteroceptive). The genome that is held inside the seed is a map but so is the song that is its oscillating electromagnetic field.

There is an innate tendency in Universe, within Gaia, for self-organized systems to vibrate in harmony, to share rhythms. It’s a universal phenomenon, as foundational as chemistry . . . or self-organization. As Joachim-Ernst Berendt notes . . . Two oscillators pulsating in the same field in almost identical rhythm will tend to “lock in,” with the result that eventually their vibrations will become precisely synchronous. This phenomenon is referred to as “mutual phase-locking” or entrainment. Entrainment is universal in nature. 5 Entrainment can be found in something as simple as our hearts.

Each oscillating cell generates an electromagnetic (EM) field around it; any new cell entering that field will begin to synchronize with its oscillations. This results in a giant self-organized grouping of pacemaker cells. The heart then becomes a large EM generator that produces a field 5,000 times larger than the brain’s. As you get close to another person you can literally feel that field. We call it “being in someone’s space.” As we walk together, our fields synchronize. As we talk together, our fields synchronize.

And plants? They generate such oscillating fields constantly and as Volkov put it, they synchronize with each other.

The writer George Leonard described it well . . . In music, the miracle of entrainment is made explicit. The performer’s every gesture, every micromovement, must be perfectly entrained with the pulse of the music, or else the performance falls apart. Watch the members ...

All the subunits in ecoranges synchronize like this; they entrain together to produce one, integrated whole whose vibratory oscillation is in harmony. A unique, larger-than-the parts self-organized entity comes into being. The song of the hills emerges. New plants that enter an existent ecorange represent a new movement in the song; they entrain themselves to the song already being sung but they add new texture, new sound, new movement.

The Bushmen of the Kalahari talk, as Bradford Keeney says, of becoming “awake,” awake to the metaphysical background of the world.

When we listen to songs that move us, they do in fact heal us. The various consciousness modules we have within us—the infant, the four-year-old, the mother, and all the others—are themselves psychological expressions—specific behavioral aspects of self-organization—that possess oscillation, just as our organs, our hearts, our bodies do. Damage to, that is, disharmony in, any of those modules is carried within its oscillating field. As the poet Novalis once put it, “Every disease is a musical problem.”

The electromagnetic, oscillating field that every living thing generates as it lives contains within it the complete story of its current state of being, including every wound, illness, and need.

The songs that people write, and perform, speak to specific kinds of damage in the specific module fields that they have, and that are possessed by others. They write those songs in dreams. And as we listen to those songs later, the parts of us that need them come to the fore and for a while we dream, our conscious minds sleep. And while we sleep, that part of us synchronizes with the oscillations of the song and that song goes deep within us, reforming the field of that part of ourselves. And sometimes, those songs lead us to ways we can generate that wholeness permanently.

That is much of what healing is. The restructure of the field.

All particles are in fact waves and those waves present themselves, to those who can hear them, as sounds, in fact, as composed melodies that generate shape, form, behavior.

As Karsten Kruse and Frank Julicher put it (complicatedly), oscillations “emerge as the collective dynamic behavior of an ensemble of interacting components in the cell.”10 And that oscillating field changes from moment to moment to moment during its life. Any damage to the field is then held in its oscillatory pattern, its song. Other oscillatory patterns, held in actual songs as we known them, or in the plants we use as medicines, can alter the damage in that pattern, restore the organ to health.

As physician Mitchell Gaynor puts it, “You can look at disease as a form of disharmony. And there’s no organ system in the body that’s not affected by sound and vibration.”

We are not only dreamed into being but sung.

We can help other forms of life heal by finding the shape that they were meant to take in this particular field. We can hold them in our heart field and work toward synchronization . . . or we can sing. Which is itself a form of heart field. It is heart field made audible.

Earth is a giant living being, perhaps a superorganism, as far beyond us as we are beyond our constituent cells. DORION SAGAN

Microbial life is heavily implicated in all the biogeochemical cycles, dwarfing the contribution of multicellular organisms—which in any case have microbes at the root of their metabolism. Mitochondria and chloroplasts, the main energy- producing organelles in animal and plant cells, both have evolutionary origins as once-free bacteria annexed into the greater whole. . . . Gaia’s metabolism is microbial. WILLIAMS AND LENTON

As physicist Lee Smolin describes the situation, it seems that our life is situated inside a nested hierarchy of self-organized systems that begin with our local ecologies and extend upwards at least to the galaxy.

Few people understand that the touch of Universe upon Earth is constant. That, in fact, Earth is a truly open system. And such open systems are always being changed by the touch of the outside upon them. Every touch ripples through the system. Every touch changes something.

And these interconnections, this touching, includes a great deal more than sunlight. The Earth receives over 80 million pounds of extraterrestrial matter from the galaxy around it every year.

What is true is that the Earth does not need saving. And even if it did, human beings do not possess the comprehensive informedness necessary to understand the system well enough to control outcomes through top-down approaches—and they never will.

It is true that human-driven alterations have occurred in the biosphere in the past two hundred years. It is true that the climate of Earth is changing considerably. But this does not mean that the Earth is in trouble, it means that the current ecological expression the Earth has generated in this geological age and that we take for granted is facing a phase change. This has implications for human habitability—most especially for the survival of human civilization—not Earth continuance.

There were, it seems, inadvertent stowaways during the pre-Apollo missions to the moon, bacteria: Streptococcus mitis. The “only known survivor,” as NASA put it, “of unprotected space travel.” The

Human pollinators are now taking the bacteria exactly where they need to go. We, inevitably, think it is all about us, not realizing that we are in fact performing cross-pollination.

What is at risk, from our human point of view, is not the planet but our civilization. It is entirely dependent on resource extraction, a resource extraction that cannot be maintained. We have already exceeded the human carrying capacity of Earth. We are, at this point, burning the house to keep warm in the winter.

There is another way to approach the world, another path to the gathering of knowledge, one that has embedded within it both love and empathy. But it means abandoning the old forms of thinking. It means taking another road.

That Freud was the first “wild” analyst is one of the difficult facts in the history of psychoanalysis. It is easy to forget that in what is still its most creative period—roughly between 1893 and 1939—when Freud, Jung, Ferenczi, Klein and Anna Freud herself were learning what they thought of as the “new science,” they had no formal training.

In virtually every field in which great innovation has occurred, the early explorers were either untrained, minimally trained, unconventionally trained or trained in some other, unrelated, field. And all of them found flaws in the assertions of the orthodox. It is the origin of Lynn Margulis’s work She refused to believe her teachers when they told her the nuclei in the mitochondria were irrelevant

Nobel Prize– winner Randy Schekman recently added his voice to the chorus with his article “How journals like Nature, Cell, and Science are damaging science: The incentives offered by top journals distort science, just as big bonuses distort banking.”

Part of the reason for our current troubles is because the practice of what is called science has changed considerably, and not for the better, since the late 1800s and early 1900s. It’s now filled with the sober, well-prepared ones. It was, once, the practice of what is more accurately natural philosophy. These were people, male and female, of all nationalities, degreed and nondegreed, who were interested in understanding the world in which they lived.

By 1986, at least 362 scientists, including 64 in the National Academy, sat on the advisory boards of biotech firms. The number of those who held equity positions or consultancies was several times greater.

What is studied, who is allowed to study it, the outcome of studies, what studies are made public, and how the accumulated knowledge is put into practice are all controlled by corporate interests—with the active participation of most researchers, and most universities.

Seventy percent of all psychology papers are produced in the U.S. while almost all psychological research is performed on graduate students, a group that represents 0.2 percent of the world population. Researchers take their results to be representative of the human species, but the outcomes are not actually generalizable to other populations.

And the kinds of top-down solutions that so many people want to impose on the rest of the world are, in nearly all instances, coming from a position of dissociation, that is, I am here, the world is over there.

The answers we need will never come from experts out there; they can’t. They will come from you—and people like you.

human continuance now depends entirely upon: A. The intuitive wisdom of each and every individual. B. The individual’s comprehensive informedness. C. The individual’s integrity of speaking and acting only on the individual’s own within self-intuited

We need the eccentrics, the dreamers, the unconventional ones, the doubters, those who are dissatisfied with the limitations imposed on knowledge.

In 2012, scientists who had been struggling for over a decade to find the molecular structure of an AIDS enzyme gave up. The methods they were using to find the structure, as they put it, “just didn’t work.” So, in desperation they turned the problem over to the internet and the gaming community. “To the astonishment of scientists,” as reporters put it, the problem was solved in ten days.25And in 2012 a 16-year-old solved a mathematical problem that had stumped mathematicians for 30 years. When the boy found out there was no solution he just refused, he said, to accept that it was so. So,