Are Plants Conscious?
In the latest series of the Telepathy Tapes podcast we encounter a young non-verbal autistic girl called Nina Meehan. Nina was born in Fairfield Connecticut and for sixteen years she was trapped inside her body unable to speak. Doctors told her parents that Nina lacked the cognitive ability to properly communicate and her mother, Raquel, had given up hope on ever being able to connect fully with her daughter. However, when new tools and technologies became available, Nina learnt how to ‘spell’ out what she was thinking on an iPad. The first thing that she spelled was, “I am Psychic” and the second thing was “I communicate with plants.”
As Nina became more competent at spelling, she began to explain to her parents that she also had the ability to diagnose people’s health by reading their etheric energy fields. She would recommend a particular plant that would then help heal that person. A good example of this came early on when her sister Natalia became ill with a compromised immune system. Nina advised her to start taking the herb astragalus to help rebuild her immunity. Obviously, Nina had had no formal education about herbs and no one in her family had either, so it is very interesting to note that astragalus has been used for thousands of years within Chinese medicine as a lung tonic specifically used to boost immunity. When asked how she knew which plant to administer she would reply ‘the plants tell me.’
As fantastical as this may sound this is clearly not a new phenomenon. Tribal elders, shamans and medicine women from around the globe have always said that they had the ability to commune with plants. Often, they would go off into a trance, sometimes with the help of a psychedelic plant, to discover the cure for someone’s particular ailment. It’s quite possible, probable in fact, that this is how humans originally discovered which plants had certain curative and healing properties. It is often presumed that medicinal knowledge was gained through trial and error over the millennia but our ancestors, shamans and people like Nina would argue that it is through our lost ability to communicate directly with plants that we have been given this invaluable information.
A quick google search on the Western scientific view on plant consciousness, gives the impression that there is no evidence to suggest that plants are in any way conscious. However, if you start to dig a little deeper you discover that this may not actually be the case. Back in 1966, a CIA interrogation specialist Cleeve Backster, was training policemen in New York how to operate a polygraph or lie detector. The instrument usually measures the electrical resistance of the human skin, however one morning, on some strange hunch, he decided to attach the electrodes to the office potted rubber plant. What he discovered was nothing short of revolutionary.
Backster decided to try what he calls ‘the threat to well-being principle, a well-established method of triggering emotionality in humans.’ In other words, he decided to torture the plant. He had the idea of getting a match to burn one of the leaves and to his astonishment, the moment he had this thought, the pen on the polygraph machine began to spike. Just the mere thought of intending to harm the plant was enough to produce a dramatic change in the machines tracing pattern. Backster went on to perform many more experiments including one where he was dropping live shrimps into boiling water (typical bloody scientist!) and each time he did so, a stress response was recorded by the plants polygraph read out.
Apparently experiments like these have been replicated many times over, so it would appear that there is at least some evidence to show that plants do have a kind of awareness that we can’t explain within the western scientific model. However, consciousness itself is something that is very difficult to define, let alone measure and we may have to broaden our definition of it drastically if we are to begin to understand the true nature of nature. In the meantime, as ever, I shall defer to the Taoists who believe that there is consciousness first and then there is the physical expression of it. Under this model all things are possible.