A look at the recent conference- Plant Consciousness: Revolutionizing Our Relationship with Plants.
When I decided to join the Plant Consciousness event in London, I was still enjoying the traveling life in Peru. As I had slowed down to become more sensitive to the subtle life of nature, I was excited about these topics of consciousness, quantum physics, the amazing intelligence of the plant world and teacher plants such as Iboga and Ayahuasca.
Plant Consciousness, set in the beautiful Regents Park (the University Conference Center to be exact) with over 300 people in attendance, opened my mind. Opened to the wide range of sensing, seeing and hearing that exists in plants and trees, the direct influence plants have via chemical compounds in our brain – and therefore our mood and behaviours – and why and how to start listening to what plants, in essence our elders, have to say to us.
Plant Intelligence
Even though I love being in nature, I was never that excited about the plant world. You see, the behaviour of plants is so subtle, that most people, including myself, failed to notice it for a long time. Or more accurately, we have collectively forgotten to notice it. But in fact, plants have intelligence and consciousness. As ethno-pharmacologist Dennis McKenna reminded us, we think a brain or at least a nervous system is necessary to be intelligent. But it is neural networks that are important. Mycelium root networks can be miles in diameter, and those are thinking neural networks.
Pam Montgomery pointed out that plants have a long view, as they have been around 400 to 450 million years, and in fact multiple scientific studies have proven plants have ability for memory. Let me remind you, the modern form of humans only evolved about 200,000 years ago, so if plants have intelligence and memory, they will hold a lot of knowledge for us.
Plants in Relationship to Human Intelligence
We have co-evolved and live interrelated with the plant world, and plants have a direct influence on our moods and behaviors, through our diets. Through photosynthesis an enormous variety of organic molecules is created, from sunlight, water and carbon dioxide, which is amazing in itself. The molecules in our brain that determine our moods and behavior, such as dopamine and serotonin, are plant compounds.
Bonny Casel School of Natural Medicine UK made the point that our right hemisphere, which sees the world as whole and interconnected, needs a plant-based diet to survive. Whereas our left hemisphere, which focuses on more narrow solutions, familiarity and separate parts, can get by with just simple low energy foods. A very interesting point in a world that is in crisis because of our worldview of separation….
Plant Senses
In recent years the scientific community has gathered evidence that the plant world has a range of behaving, seeing, hearing and feeling, that goes wildly beyond what human beings can perceive. Just some examples, mustard plants that ‘hear’ the sounds of caterpillars eating on their leaves, excrete increased amounts of mustard oils to protect itself. It is also known that the human eye can only see a very narrow band of frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. Infrared and UV is out of our range. However plants sense UV light, magnetic fields, and planets in the night sky.
Plants can perceive emotion because they can sense body heat. Plants can feel something 1/8 the pressure, heat or cold of what a human can feel. Just look at something as simple as a plant adapting their direction of growth long before touching a rock on it’s path. Another fascinating behavior is that in dense forests large trees feed little trees through mycelium networks, even more, they favor their own offspring in times of scarcity….
Ayahuasca, Iboga and Other Teacher Plants
Day two of the event revolved mostly around teacher plants. In the last 15 years or so, powerful teacher plants such as Ayahuasca, San Pedro and Iboga have been spreading globally. They have left their homes in Africa and the rainforests of Latin America to speak with a loud voice. As multiple crises are threatening life on earth, humankind needs to heal, raise consciousness and remember that we are one with nature.
Dennis McKenna spoke about Plant Human Coevolution Origins Of The Imagination, and the past and future of Ayahuasca. Like his brother, Terrence McKenna, he has been immersed in plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, culture, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. His view is that plants may have given us the ability to understand meaning and abstractions, the foundation for language, and the ability to share ideas across time and place. As our culture shapes our world more than anything, in the form of law, education, religion, and so on, this means the impact of teacher plants to the future of earth can be immense.
Yann Guignon came to the stage as a voice for Iboga. Iboga is a small tree native to west and central Africa, and is used both for spiritual purposes, as particularly a potential ‘interruptor’ for drug addiction. With it’s growing popularity and due to unsustainable practices, tabernanthe iboga has been declared an endangered species. Yann and his team have now taken the responsibility to preserve, study and share knowledge about this medicinal plant and the indigenous traditions of the Gabonese forest people, and can be followed on Blessings of the Forest.
Even though these teacher plants stand out, Pam Montgomery also helped us remember that in fact all plants are our teachers…
Nourishing Mind and Heart
This is just a glimpse of the weekend. Satish Kumar was there, earth pilgrim, former monk and long-term peace and environment activist. With his calm and humorous presence, gently reminding us of our interconnectedness ‘You are, therefore I am’. Kurikindi filled the room with emotion, as soon as he set foot on stage with his wife. He shared his heartfelt story of the threat to the Ecuadorian rainforest, his home, his family, and the abundance of plants there…. Many other speakers and performers reminded us both of the times of crises we are in, and emphasizing our responsibilities and relationship with each other and all living beings. Join Plant Consciousness on Facebook for regular inspiration on these fascinating topics.
AsWithin
SoWithout
*read entire article at: http://www.wakingtimes.com/2015/11/11/interconnected-by-plant-consciousness/
Replies
555NewDayDawning555
Preacherman, don't tell me,
Heaven is under the Earth.
I know you don't know
What Life is really worth.
It's not all that glitters is gold;
Half the story has never been told:
So now you see the Light, eh!
Stand up for your rights. Come on!…
Most people think,
Great God will come from the skies,
Take away everything
And make everybody feel high.
But if you know what life is worth,
You will look for yours on Earth
And now you see the Light,
You stand up for your rights. Jah!…
~Bob Marley
§§§
“One of the ways that your project, your personal healing, or your social invention can change the world is through story. But even if no one ever learns of it, even if it is invisible to every human on Earth, it will have no less of an effect.”...“The state of interbeing is a vulnerable state. It is the vulnerability of the naive altruist, of the trusting lover, of the unguarded sharer. To enter it, one must leave behind the seeming shelter of a control-based life, protected by walls of cynicism, judgment, and blame.”... “We sense that ‘normal’ isn’t coming back, that we are being born into a new normal: a new kind of society, a new relationship to the earth, a new experience of being human.” ~Charles Eisenstein
*I highly recommend Eisenstein's book: The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
Fear is the foundation of morality, yet nothing further away from source.
Still, seems interesting to see what can we do when bi-polarizing Source. A conscience without conscience, originally free from all parameter.
Yet, we have it here now, arguing about leafs.
Beautiful, and boring, but beautiful non the less.
Plants are truly more amazing than we realize. All plants have healing qualities, Mustard flowers are a cure for long term depression, for example. I know someone about 20 yrs old who had been addicted to heroin since he was a young child.....he just cured this and shifted his whole consciousness with Iboga. I have been microdosing with Iboga every day for the past 3 months to clear my energy body. I´m taking a break for a month and then I will begin microdosing with Ayahuasca.
Another thought here.....the fellow I mentioned also had problems with self harm, nightmares, psychic attacks, depression, etc.,,,,,the Iboga cleared all this. I would say that Iboga clears the pain body. Would it be correct to say that Archons are pain bodies.?
~Thank you for sharing, dear Feather. Your insight & wisdom is always appreciated. I've been hearing more & more about people exploring microdosing with Entheogens & having meaningful/healing results. I microdosed with Psilocybin for a couple of weeks a number of years back & found the experience to be incredibly illuminating... on many levels. I've never tried Iboga or Ayahuasca (I remain a bit intimidated, to be honest) but have encountered many people who attest to their amazing & challenging, healing properties. I'd love to hear more about your experiences, as I truly value your perspective. *When it comes to the Archons, I see them as an 'off word', parasitic force, that ultimately feeds off our pain bodies... at the same time (especially as they've been using Humanity as a host since the ancient world,) it makes sense that they have effectively become part of us... & the psychic wounds that bind us to duality. Power Plants can serve as a key to unlocking & breaking the insidious nature of this symbiotic relationship. ~InLight555
Another Green World: Psychedelics and Ecology
by Daniel Pinchbeck
I tend to view the naturally occurring psychedelics as emissaries from the larger community of life, bearing elder-species wisdom. As the herbalist Morgan Brent has proposed, it is almost as if the vegetal world assigned certain plants to be the diplomats and teachers to our young and confused species, to help put us on a different path than the one we have chosen, racing to ecological decimation and self-extinction. How else to explain the consistent messages received in mushroom, ayahuasca, iboga, and peyote visions of a world out of balance, of the need to take responsibility, of the vast empathic sentience of the Gaian mind?
In the same way that we garden plants, teacher plants like ayahuasca seem to garden us when we ingest them. During shamanic sessions, people often get direct messages about how to transform their lives. Sometimes, their explorations lead to radical revelations of their attachment to mediocre diets, relationships, jobs, and so on. In many cases, they eventually take the advice and purge these negative influences from their lives.
There seems to be a link between the loss of shamanism and initiatory experience in the West and the genesis of a human culture able to treat nature as something alienated, outside of itself. The recovery of psychedelic awareness in the 1960s coincided with the birth of the environmental movement, and perhaps helped to inspire it. Believing in an objective world of material facts whose apparent reality was constantly reiterated by mass media and science, modernizing humanity lost access to the primordial and participatory modes of awareness known to indigenous cultures. We denied our innate knowledge of our reciprocal relationship with the natural world that not only surrounds but also constitutes us, as even our bodies are dense microbial environments.
My first mushroom trips in college helped to decondition me from my socialized personality and called into question my naïve assumptions that the civilization surrounding me was enduring and inevitable, that the air-conditioned nightmare of the American empire would continue forever. Later journeys confirmed this understanding, stripping away layers of acculturation. In West Africa I underwent initiation into the Bwiti spiritual discipline, taking iboga, their visionary sacrament. I was taken through a life review during that trip. It seemed as if a benevolent spiritual intelligence was guiding me, revealing how my negative and compulsive behavior patterns were formed by patterns set in my childhood.
I was also given the faith that these patterns could be changed, that the splinters in my soul could be removed one by one, if I found the will to do so.
Gregory Bateson famously coined the phrase “ecology of mind.” Along with the outer ecology we see in nature, there is an inner ecology that consists of our thinking process and emotional tendencies. It seems that our inner and outer ecology reflect and reinforce one another. On the macro level, our current society is a projection of the collective thoughts and ideas developed by past generations.
In order to change our society from imminent doom, we need to clear out the old garbage and evolve new pathways of thinking and feeling as quickly as we can—to revamp our mental and emotional ecology. Psychedelic substances—visionary plant teachers—seem to play a crucial role in this process. Several books have come out recently revealing the importance of psychedelics in the development of the personal computer and the internet. Many crucial insights in biology and physics were psychedelically inspired. The almost stereotypical psychedelic gnosis of interconnectivity, unity of all being, and infinite fractal unfoldings may indicate the potential for a quantum leap in human consciousness, to a new stage of awareness that transcends and includes previous levels, or what the philosopher Jean Gebser called “consciousness structures.”
I suspect that psychedelics play a part in the process of our species evolution—a movement from one structure of consciousness to the next. One hypothesis is that we might be on the threshold of a shift from the biological and physical phase of our evolution to the psychic phase. Whatever comes next, any future for our species will be ecologically strict, and the gnosis we gain from communing with our botanical elders can provide us with crucial insights.
http://realitysandwich.com/181669/psychedelics_and_ecology/
Stick, what I´m doing today is making a homeopathic potency using the herbs....this way we only work with the frequency. I will give these a try and let you know how it goes.
The reason I dropped by was to tell you about the Paramagnetic alignments next week. I do these every year and enjoy them a lot.. http://lightquest-intl.com/schedule-workshops/
Thanx form the link, I'll check it out...
My name is "off and on" and I enjoy torturing the little man within.
We learn things from each other this way, even though we're still One.