Morning has broken like the first morning.
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning,
Praise for them springing fresh from the world.
Sweet the rains new fall, sunlit from Heaven,
Like the first dewfall on the first grass.
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden,
Sprung in completeness where His feet pass.
– Eleanor Farjeon (1881-1965), from “Morning has broken” (1931)
We talked last week about our need to learn to share an ever deeper human love as part of our effort at spiritual growth. So it seems to be only fitting to follow that discussion by talking about something that is also important, even though we take it entirely for granted, and that is the gentle, green and leafy love that is happening all around us. My office has a big bow window, and although it also has a desk, I prefer to work sitting in that window with my laptop and my two large plants. One plant began its life as a Realtor’s prop on a front-hall table nearly a decade ago, when my younger daughter’s family was selling their house. That plant has since become gigantic, having grown into a sturdy tree with its three wooden trunks twisted together and its leaves a rich and abundant display. Now it stands more than four feet tall in a big ceramic pot on the floor between my chair and the glass. The other plant is a pretty fountain of pink, white, and green ivy leaves that cascade from a large pot on a plant-stand two feet beyond my hassock. I have just returned from a ten-day business trip, and I have found that, sadly, once again my plants were worrying while I was away.
We don’t think of plants as loving their people. Although we do assume that cats love their moms! My older daughter, who lives with us, recently adopted two rescue kittens. She takes frequent business trips that were hard on her kittens in the beginning, even though we kept explaining to them that Mom was going to come right back. Fortunately, her adoptees soon adjusted, and now they spend their days with my husband and me whenever our daughter is traveling. But my plants will accept no substitute. Even though their watering schedule had been maintained, and even though they got abundant sunlight, when I came home after ten days away, there were leaves shriveled and dying on both of them.
The most transformational book that I ever have read is The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. Nothing else comes close! I first read that amazing book in 1973, its year of first publication, and I didn’t realize until years later the way it had formed a basis for my fifty years of afterlife research. It opened my eyes to a deeper awareness that nothing ever is as it seems. It primed me to accept the evidence that what we experience as human consciousness is universal. And never again, for the rest of my life, have I cut a tomato or grated a carrot without wincing. The fact that such a seminal masterwork which is so fundamental to our understanding of life has been steadfastly ignored by mainstream scientists because it doesn’t fit their predetermined narrative was my first clue that the mainstream science emperor is sadly altogether naked. And that science emperor appears now likely to remain naked, not only for the rest of my life, but perhaps naked even for my children’s and my grandchildren’s lives as well.
The Tompkins and Bird book’s fundamental insight is that plants are conscious and they mentally communicate with one another, and they also mentally communicate with us. And what an amazing revelation that is! Consider only the work of Cleve Backster, who in the nineteen-sixties was one of America’s leading experts on lie detectors. One morning in 1966, Mr. Backster decided on a whim to use his office plant as an experimental subject. He attached a galvanometer to one of its leaves. And, what do you know? He found that the plant in his office was reacting very much as a person would react as it sat there in its pot having its transient, amazingly human-like thoughts. He soon found that the most extreme reactions in his plant were produced when he decided to burn one of its leaves. Its reaction was less if Backster only imagined burning the leaf, without actually intending to do the plant harm. His plant would react, too, if other living things in the room were mentally threatened with harm. And Backster and other researchers later demonstrated that these reactions are present even in living fragments of plants. My goodness, plants can read the minds of their own keepers even from a distance of miles away! There is so much more to Backster’s work that mainstream science still ignores. These amazing revelations are now almost sixty years old, and they are all by themselves sufficient reason for you to pick up and read one of the most amazing and most unjustly ignored books in human history.
This discovery that plants are actually conscious still fills me with wonder, to this day. It formed a basis for my research-based awareness that what we experience as consciousness must be primary. There is no other explanation that fits all the evidence! So when I read the ultimate quantum-physics-for-dummies book, Quantum Enigma by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, and I found that the greatest of all quantum physicists had decades earlier reached the same conclusions, I had a profound and joyous eureka moment. As the genius quantum physicist Max Planck famously said, ”I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
Here is an astonishing video that gives you some sense of just how sensitive and mutually cooperative, and how oddly aware and almost human-like plants actually are as they intensively work and live together in their wild communities, right there in our own backyards. Please do take the time to watch this video, since I cannot conceivably do it justice. I only can tell you that after you have watched it, you will forever after see each patch of forest as a thriving community of sentient individuals in communication with one another, sharing their resources and caring for their young, and even fighting off anything that means to do their little community harm. You will never look at any plant of any size in the same way again.
So, yes, what we experience as human consciousness is the base creative force, and it is governed by what we experience as emotion. Consciousness is all that objectively exists, which means that it should not really surprise us to find that every living thing is in some way conscious. And in fact, that may also be true of even what we consider to be non-living things. If Consciousness is the base creative force and all that exists, then perhaps even things like rocks might also be in some way conscious? One of the things that we generally do when we first return to our eternal home after death is to go sightseeing, even on other planets. After all, there is neither time nor space in the afterlife, so we can easily travel to far distant places. I recall long ago reading an account by someone who had been enjoying doing his post-death touring, and he talked about visiting a planet where the life was not carbon-based, but instead it was silica–based. That entire planet teemed with life! But you didn’t realize that at first anything at all on the planet that he was visiting was alive, because it all moved so ve-e-e-ry sl-o-o-wly. And, you know, come to think of it now, the rocks all around us on planet earth are moving ve-e-e-ery sloo-o-owly too-o-o….
I have been back home in our cozy bow window with my two plant friends for ten days now, which was as long as I had been away from them. Of course I cleaned them up, I got rid of the dead leaves, and since I have returned there has not been even one additional dead leaf on either plant. Not a single sign of stress at all, now that they have their human back, and in fact the tree here beside me has confidently begun to put forth some new baby leaves to replace those that were dropped during its time of crisis while I was away. I can see, too, that the ivy is happily beginning to flower again, for the second time this spring. It occurs to me to wonder whether these plants might have mentally communicated about their sudden loss of their human when I was so abruptly gone? Or do plants of different species unfortunately communicate in different plant-languages? But to answer one question that might perhaps now be occurring to you: No, of course not! Do I look like the kind of person who would give names to plants?
Actually, though, for people and plants to spend our days in close proximity to one another is healthy for all three of us. Plants exhale oxygen, and they breathe in carbon dioxide, while people do the reverse; and it has lately been shown that plants also help to improve indoor air quality in tightly-constructed modern homes. But now I am already beginning to worry about these plants’ mental health when I take my next business trip, even though that is not planned to happen until mid-August. Do you think that I ought to plan to Zoom with them the next time I am away from them? Or perhaps just hearing my voice by phone might be enough to comfort them? Am I starting to sound like a demented plant-lady?
I have never had much of a green thumb, but my mother had a remarkable way with plants. Her house was full of gigantic ferns and big, leafy trees in pots. She had flower gardens every summer, too, each year freshly grown from seeds, and she grew her own vegetables, corn and tomatoes and squash, and cucumbers from which she made the best pickles. I can recall thinking when I was a child that caring for plants looked like too much work, but these two plants have grown to be enormous so quickly, and all on their own. As I think about it in retrospect, my parents simply ran an old tractor to till the soil each spring, and then they stayed ahead of the weeds on weekends until their vegetables could take care of themselves. Perhaps they staked their tomatoes. There was not a lot of work to gardening the way they did it. Texas summers are too hot for growing vegetables, but we drip-irrigate bougainvillea plants each summer in pots in front of my big bow window. So at least these two will have those bougainvilleas to commiserate with through the glass when I am away in August. And maybe also having family members come in and talk to them when I am away the next time might help?
I had never before thought much about the fact that God must dearly love all of God’s green creatures, having made so many of them, and having made all their communities so love-filled and so heart-stoppingly beautiful. Some of these more recent insights about the symbiotic relationships among all our forest friends are making their way into professional forestry practices now, especially in the old-growth forests of Europe, and with results that are shaking up even the most determinedly unsentimental scientific types. The primary problem with mainstream science is that it took a wrong turn into willful materialistic cluelessness more than a century ago, when the scientific community as a whole first refused to accept the great Max Planck’s conclusions about the broader implications of quantum mechanics. But nevertheless, now here we are.
At this point, the best work being done in investigative science is being done not by materialist scientists, who are long since out of ideas, but by more open-minded creationist scientists. I receive the latter’s newsy emails twice each week, and what they have to say is often compelling. After two centuries of floundering, Darwin’s ideas about blind evolution and natural selection are looking more and more nonsensical, while the whole concept of design and a Consciousness-based Designer is making more and much more sense. Here is another video for your viewing pleasure!
We live in a house blessed by dozens of magnificent trees that shared with us our grandchildren’s growing-up. These trees were not much more than saplings in pictures of our next generation as young children, while now they are great oaks and cedar elms. Just because they always made so little fuss, we used to think of green plants as not sentient. But we realize now that these trees probably consider our family to be their own family, since we have lived in this house for the past twenty years. If we ever were to sell our house, they would mourn our loss the way my office plants mourn for me every time I am briefly away, so we have assured our trees that we will be leaving this house to our family’s next generation… which of course is also their own.
To paraphrase an ancient Chinese proverb, green plants hold up half the sky.
The likelihood that not just animals, but also plants are as sentient and as loving as people will rock your world if you allow the full implications of that fact to fully seize your mind! And in the afterlife there is no question about it. The plants there are conscious and extremely loving, and they will reach out and caress you as you walk by. But just look around you now! Look at this whole green and living earth! And look at the stars! Oh my dear friend, every kind of love in all creation is directed toward your own spiritual growth! And even the poor, foolish plants in my office love me, and they keep sadly mourning my repeated and always unexpected loss. And the grass beneath your feet, and the trees that line your driveway, all the vegetation in your life loves you! Oh, what dumb fools we always have been, never to have seen how absolutely, how utterly and overwhelmingly each one of us is so completely loved!
Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning.
Born of the one light, Eden saw play.
Praise with elation, praise every morning.
God’s recreation of the new day.
Morning has broken like the first morning.
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning,
Praise for them springing fresh from the world.
– Eleanor Farjeon (1881-1965), from “Morning has broken” (1931)