A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [138]
"Immediately I understood something important was going on. I could think of no conventional scientific explanation. There was no one else in the lab suite, and I wasn't doing anything that might have provided a mechanistic trigger. From that split-second my consciousness hasn't been the same. My whole life has been devoted to looking into this."
I had flown to interview him for a magazine. I was glad I had come. I'd wanted to talk to him since I first read about his work when I was a kid. I don't think it's too much to say that his observations on February 2, 1966 changed not only his life but mine. Through my teens and early twenties, as my perception of an animate world wavered, a part of me kept returning to what I'd read of his work. He provided experimental verification of what I understood in my heart—that the world is alive and sentient. And it came when I still believed in science.
Backster continued, "After that first observation, I talked to scientists from different fields, to get their explanations for what was happening. But it was foreign to them. So I designed an experiment to explore in greater depth what I began to call primary perception."
I raised my eyebrows at the name. He said, "I couldn't call what I was witnessing extrasensory perception, because plants don't have most of the first five senses to start with. This perception on the part of the plant seemed to take place at a much more basic, or primary, level. Anyway, what emerged was an experiment in which I arranged for brine shrimp to be dropped automatically at random intervals into simmering water, while the plants reaction was recorded at the other end of the lab."
He paused in his rapid-fire talk, then continued, "It's very very hard to eliminate the connection between the experimenter and the plants being tested. Even a brief association with the plants—just a few hours—is enough for them to become attuned to you. Then, even though you automate and randomize the experiment and leave the laboratory, guaranteeing you are entirely unaware of when the experiment starts, the plants will remain attuned to you, no matter where you go. At first, my partner and I would go to a bar a block away, but after a while we began to suspect the plants were not responding to the death of the brine shrimp at all, but instead to the rising and falling levels of excitement in our conversations.
"Finally, we had someone else buy the plants and store them in an unused part of the building. On the day of the experiment, we brought the plants in, hooked them up, and left. This meant the plants were in a strange environment, they had the pressure of the electrodes, they had a trickle of electricity going through their leaves, and they'd been deserted. Because they were not attuned to us or anyone else, they began 'looking around' for anything that would acquaint them with their environment. Then, and only then, did something so subtle as the deaths of the brine shrimp get picked up by the plants."
I asked, "Do they only become attuned to humans, or to others in their environment as well?"
"I'll answer that with an example," Cleve said. "Often I hook up a plant and just go about my business, then observe what makes it respond. One day, I was boiling water in a teakettle to make coffee. I realized I needed the teakettle for something else, and so poured the scalding water down the sink. The plant being monitored showed a huge reaction. It turns out that if you don't put chemicals or hot water down the sink for a long time, a little jungle begins to grow down there. The plant was responding to the death of the microbes.
"I've been amazed at the perception capability right down to the bacterial level. One sample of yogurt, for example, will pick up when another is being fed. Sort of like, 'That one's getting food.