The Secret Teachings of Plants Quotes

“One of our greatest fears is to eat the wildness of the world.

Our mothers intuitively understood something essential: the green is poisonous to civilization. If we eat the wild, it begins to work inside us, altering us, changing us. Soon, if we eat too much, we will no longer fit the suit that has been made for us. Our hair will begin to grow long and ragged. Our gait and how we hold our body will change. A wild light begins to gleam in our eyes. Our words start to sound strange, nonlinear, emotional. Unpractical. Poetic.

Once we have tasted this wildness, we begin to hunger for a food long denied us, and the more we eat of it the more we will awaken.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature

“Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d. I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell. —WALT WHITMAN”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart

“You should never denigrate
the form in which your perceptions arise,
never think yourself less-than,
if you do not use scientific metaphors.
Each of us must reclaim our ability
to know the world directly,
deeply and well.
(Any feeling of less-than
is merely a symptom
of the colonization of your mind.)
Don’t leave it in the hands of experts.
That is how
we got
into this mess
in the first place.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart

“How much of life have I wasted by believing the thing I was taught, that thinking is what makes us better, that the brain is superior to heart. —AUTHOR’S JOURNAL, JUNE 2001”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart

“By locating our consciousness in only one biological oscillator, the brain, we blinded ourselves to perceptions that have been common to human beings since they emerged from this Earth. In gaining a reductionist understanding of the world, we lost touch with the essential nature of the Earth and ourselves.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature

“Once people have a name for something, their tendency is to think they understand it and once they think they understand it, they quit experiencing it fresh and new each time they encounter it. Should the name itself be inaccurate it starts a chain of cultural and individual events that lead to outcomes that are not predictable in the initial act of naming.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature

“You have got to be in a different state from common.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart