“My supreme acknowledgment to Mother Nature and her many creations whose life forms have passed through the lab and revealed through my curious mind their often hidden capabilities.” — Cleve Backster
If you have a curious mind, you’re open to exploring unfamiliar territories. And when your curiosity is aimed at nature, you may get the greatest surprise in your lifetime.
How Cleve Backster discovered that a plant can read his mind:
One fateful morning in February of 1966, Cleve Backster didn’t expect that his curiosity could lead him to alter humanity’s perception of plants, forever.
Grover Cleveland Backster Jr., an interrogation specialist in the CIA who founded the CIA’s polygraph unit, knows that a polygraph or lie detector can measure electrical resistance.
So out of curiosity, he attached the device in one of the leaves of the Dracaena plant sitting in the room to see if he could get a response when the plant is subjected to stress.
He wanted to think of ways how to stress the plant. So he thought of burning a match with the intent of burning a leaf.
No sooner than the thought came, the tracing started to show a pattern corresponding to the response you get when a human is subjected to an emotional stimulation.
Backster was immensely surprised to find out how the plant reacted to his sly thoughts and if they were really able to read his mind.
Inspired by this occurrence, he spent the rest of his life studying the ability of plants to communicate with and read their environments, and their reactions to living things.
But this was not the first time this kind of experiment happened:
In 1848, the German experimental psychologist Gustav Fechner, suggested that plants are capable of emotions and they respond positively to talk, attention, attitude, and affection.
In the 1900’s, Indian scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose began experimenting plants and invented devices and instruments that can measure the plant’s electrical responses.
Out of his extensive research, Bose hypothesized that plants can feel pain, understand affection, and demonstrate other sensory abilities.
Because Backster’s polygraph experiment confirmed Bose’s findings, the polygraph expert concluded that plants have the ability to communicate through telepathy.
This theory, which he termed as “Primary Perception”, was tested over and over again and was widely reported as highly plausible.
However, the scientific community rejected it, despite the countless researches and evidence showing that plants, somehow, react when you think doing bad things to them.
Even Myth Busters tried to test this myth, approaching it really skeptical, and being mind boggled by the results of their experiment.
Why was his work rejected by the scientific community:
When Backster’s work gained public acclaim, the scientific community criticized it for lack of repeatability.
The researchers who tried to replicate his experiments lacked the honest intention factor, thus, they didn’t get the expected results.
Backster defended that plants were quite sophisticated, reacting only to authentic and emotionally backed intentions.
As this disagreement continued for decades, only a little progress was made. In a recent interview Backster commented:
“I have file drawers full of high quality anecdotal data showing time and again how bacteria, plants, and so on are all fantastically in tune with each other. Human cells, too, have this primary perception capability, but somehow it’s gotten lost at the conscious level. Or perhaps we never had such a talent.
“I suspect that when a person is spiritually advanced enough to handle such perceptions, she or he will become properly tuned in. Until then it might be best not to be tuned in, because of the damage we could cause by mishandling the received information.”
A new study that could give a crucial link for all the evidence:
Backster and Bose’s experiments could have come to a halt until a recent study was published in the scientific journal, Biomed Central Ecology.
The researchers gathered evidence that plants do communicate with each other with the use of nano mechanical sound waves.
The authors of the study proposed that the biochemical process within the plants’ cells produces acoustic or vibrational signals.
This signals are then used to communicate with each other in both spatial and environmental information. This can explain what Backster detected in his first experiment.
Nevertheless, despite the lack of support from the mainstream science, Backster found advocates from the metaphysical community who believed in his work.
He claimed that there is really a life force, a cosmic energy surrounding all living things, and that we are all connected through a conscious field of thoughts.
Nature is a brotherhood we all share. It’s a network in which each living organism needs the others, in a direct or an indirect way, to function and evolve.
