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

by Stephen Harrod Buhner

The Universe is a nonlinear, self-organized system. The Earth is a nonlinear self-organized system embedded within that larger system. Outcomes can’t be predicted by using a top-down approach. The analysis has to happen on the ground, in the moment, by people who are in relationship with and attending to that particular location. As Nigel Clark notes, “many of the ordering and controlling imperatives that were once definitive of modernity are now known to unleash cascades of unforeseen consequences: by-products that arise out of the sheer complexity attained in our interchanges with the biophysical world.”

It will not be in government or in NGO hierarchies of “let-us-help-you- irrespective-of-what-you-think-you-need.” It will not be in old forms. It will come out of individual human beings and their love of place, their need, and their genius.

Somehow we must do what Voltaire once did . . . we must rediscover how to ask simple questions about ourselves. 1

And perhaps one of the simplest questions we must ask ourselves is how does this life I am in feel to me? How does this job feel? How does this house feel? How does this denuded forest feel?

For when you feel, you are nobody but yourself. As Judy Garland once put it, it’s better to “be a first-rate version of yourself rather than a second-rate version of somebody else.”

To think differently means to think differently. It means giving up dissociated mentation. It means diving into the heart of the world and finding out for yourself what is there.

And more than what you have found, what you felt during the journey. For the feelings that you have as the world touches you and as you touch the world are unique to you. The greatest act of disobedience in which you can engage is to begin to feel again to ask yourself every minute of every day every time you see something new in your field of vision How does it feel? Inevitably, this means becoming barbarian, that is, someone not civilized. If

Gaia is wilderness. Gaia is the Earth ecosystem functioning with its wildness intact. When this work is taken up, when you begin shifting your perception—as a way of life—when you begin a different kind of thinking, a Gaian way of thinking,

these consciousness modules? They are intelligent, they are aware, they have their own functional areas of importance. They are independent realities. They are self-organized systems that together make up the you that you are. They have the same capacities as all self-organized biological systems do. If you disrespect them, you will pay and pay and pay. ( Just an FYI on that one.) Within their area of expertise, they control behavior. And nothing you can do will ever change that.

You can make relationship with your many consciousness modules. That is what inner council work is.

These parts of you, these modules? They are your inner council. They are there to help the larger system, the self-organized you, remain organized throughout your lifetime. The various psychological modules are sources of wisdom, knowledge, perceptual capacities, strengths, insights, and behaviors that can help you through pretty much anything you will ever face. You

And if all these parts are unified into one synchronized whole? The power that emerges is immense. It is what Eric Berne referred to as a state of individuation, being weller than well, where you have the immediate capacity for intimacy, spontaneity, awareness, and unified action always

All people are multiple personalities. All people are made up of many conscious modules that, together, make up the larger self- organized whole that is their unique self. These consciousness modules are composed, primarily, of 1) every developmental age that human beings experience; 2) the body itself and every organ within it (every organ is intelligent, as is the body as a whole); and 3) a few other, less well-known parts such as the daimon.