Plants Are Living Creatures With Feelings

Over the years I have been an avid gardener and I have had a general love for the Earth and the living things I share it with.

But there are some things I have participated in that trouble me. One is mowing grass and the other was cutting trees for firewood. That is because I have reached the conclusion that plants have an awareness of their environment, seem to understand enemies that do them harm, and for all I know, experience pain when we inflict damage.

Scientists in Italy and Germany recently published a report of experiments with plants in Plant Physiology in which they said they found that plants under threat will react much like a human or animal. Except plants show more cunning since they are bound to the soil on which they are rooted, and therefore don't have the option of running away.

The biologists at the University of Turin and the Max Planck Institute in Jena found that during a three-year study of the Lima bean, the plants sensed and reacted to the presence of leaf-eating grubs. They responded by emitting an odor that not only alerted other plants in the area, but attracted wasps, a natural enemy of grubs.

Does this suggest that plants think?

Earlier experiments by Russian scientists show that this is a distinct possibility.

In one experiment the team had about three cabbage plants growing in soil in the same room, and placed in a row within a few inches of each other. Two of the plants were connected to polygraph machines. Then, without warning, a man dressed in distinct clothing walked into the room with a large blade and chopped the third cabbage into pieces. When completed, he left the room.

The polygraph machines registered severe reactions from the other two cabbage plants during the attack, and for some time afterward.

Every time the man that attacked the third plant walked back into the room, the cabbage plants reacted with repeated alarm that was almost as severe as the response shown during the actual attack. They obviously recognized the attacker.

In yet another experiment in 1966, a lie detector specialist again connected a plant to a polygraph. He said the machine registered changes while he just stood by, thinking about burning the plant's leaves. The plant could read his thoughts.

In my personal training in out-of-body experiences and other mental experiments with tapes purchased from the Monroe Institute, I learned that mental telepathy is the standard system of communication among animals and aliens.

When out of my body, and on those rare times when I meet alien beings in the astral, I discovered that the only way to communicate was by projection of mental images, and learning to receive them. While never good enough at image projection to glean much information from aliens, I have been able to communicate successfully with animals.

I discovered, for example, that I can call family pets . . . cats or dogs . . . to meals by projecting the mere image of food in my mind.

A few years ago, when we lived in Show Low, Arizona, I sat on an outdoor balcony and called a variety of birds out of the pines to me to receive handfuls of bird seed and peanuts. As soon as I projected the image of the food I had for them, the birds seemed to come from all around me. I even had a few squirrels show up for the meal.

Dealing with intelligent alien life forms that take on so many different shapes, even blobs of light, leads to me wonder just how intelligent the plants growing on this planet are.

Because they cannot speak, or move from place to place, has led us to believe they are things to either eat, or cut down to make room for more houses, roads or farmland. The mass slaughter of trees, grass and flowering shrubs may have been as cruel to the plant world as we consider the killings of citizens in entire cities leveled by war.

And that leads to a dilemma.

Humans are forced to eat living things to keep ourselves alive. Thus we grow plants and animals for food. Without a willingness to kill these living creatures and turn their dead carcasses into food, we are doomed to a quick end.

Maybe there are some things that we are better off not knowing.