Secret Teachings of Plants

[Mika]

So I have been reading this most amazing book, the full title which is:

The Intelligence of the Heart, The Secret Teachings of Plants, In the Direct Perception of Nature - by Stephen Harrod Buhner

I can not even begin to describe the power and effect this book has had on me, let alone the affirmation of the whole Pandora/Earth Nature Connection. The whole book is about learning, or relearning to communicate with the natural world around us, to hear the hidden and secret communications, language of plants.

"All ancient and indigenous peoples insisted their knowledge of plant medicines came from the plants themselves and not through trial-and-error experimentation. Less well known is that many Western peoples made this same assertion. There are, in fact, two modes of cognition available to all human beings—the brain-based linear and the heart-based holistic. The heart-centered mode of perception can be exceptionally accurate and detailed in its information gathering capacities if, as indigenous and ancient peoples asserted, the heart’s ability as an organ of perception is developed."

I decided i will just do as I do in my Laybrinth Thread (and no admins, i'm not going to quote a whole book, just a small part) to share some of the profound and deeply spiritual teachings - Buhner offers

EDIT: BTW .. unlike my Labyrinth thread, comments, thoughts and discussion, are welcome on this topic, sorry, should have clarified that before!



Veriditas

The natural world is a spiritual house,
where the pillars,
that are alive,
let slip sometimes
some strangely garbled words;
Man walks there
through forests of physical things
that are also spiritual things,
that watch him with affectionate looks

As the echos of the great bells
coming from a long way off
become entangled
in a deep and profound association,
a merging as huge as night,
or as huge as clear light,
odors and colors and sounds all mean -
each other.

Perfumes exist that are cool as the flesh of infants,
fragile as oboes, green as open fields,
and others exist also,
corrupt, dense, and triumphant,

having the suggestion of infinite things,
such as musk and amber, myrrh and incense,
that describe the voyages of body and soul.

- Charles Baudelaire

The Door into Nature

Seeking for truth
I considered within myself
that if there were no teachers
of medicine
in this world,
how would I set to learn the art?
Not otherwise than in
the great book of nature,
written with the finger of God.
I am accused and denounced
for not having entered in
at the right door of the art.
But which is the right one?
Galen, Avicenna, Mesue,
Rhais, or honest nature?
Through this last door
I entered,
and the light of nature,
and no apothecary's lamp
directed me on my way.

- Paracelsus


Be not discouraged,
keep on,
there are divine things
well envelop'd.
I swear to you
there are divine things
more beautiful
than words can tell.

- Walt Whitman


You must ask yourself,
in the beginning,
if you truly want to communicate with plants,
just what is the status of the plant?
Just how do you really feel about it?
Is that plant there,
the one near to your hand,
your equal?
If you do not feel that is at least
the same to you as a human being
(it is better if you understand it is superiour),
then I am not sure it will talk to you.

Let us assume,
... just for the sake of argument
that women are not the equal of men.
... because they do not think as well
Now, go and talk to one
and see how well you do.

Some of us have been raised well
and some have not,
but all of us have learned
to be impolite to plants.
(How much intelligence does it take anyway,
as Larry Niven said,
to sneak up on a carrot?)
It is not wonder they talk so seldom now
... what about psilocybin?
or that the only ones we can hear
are psychotropic,
or insistently invasive,
like kudzu.
(The loud ones!)
The cultivation
of a delicacy of perception
allows us to hear
the quiet ones,
the ones whose doctoring is most subtle.
The polite ones.
The ones who wait for us to speak
before they respond.

The first step in learning to talk to plants
is cultivating politeness,
realizing that the pine trees
that have been here
for 700 million years
must have been doing something
before we came on the scene
a mere million years ago.

... besides pining away for our existence

The first step is to respect our elders.
Pine trees know a great deal more
than we ever will about being pine trees
and about what pine trees do.
So all that nonsense you learned in school
has got to go,
especially the botany.

You are learning a different kind of language now,
and you must be suspicious of the word.
Words are the domain
of the linear mind;
only the heart
can hear the language of plants.
And words kill the perceptions of the heart.

How difficult it is not to put the sign in place of the thing;
How difficult to keep the being always living before one
and not to slay it with the word.
- Goethe

[Mika]

Feeling with the Heart

"We all walk in mysteries. We don not know what is stirring in the atmosphere that surrounds us, nor how it is connected with our own spirit. So much is certain - that at times we can put out the feelers of our soul, beyond its bodily limits; and presentiment, an actual insight ... is accorded to it." - Goethe

"A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it." - Henry David Thoreau

"There is no way of expresseing that mountain which goes beyond a mountain. Nature can only be understood with a nondiscriminating heart." - Masanobu Fukuoaka

"And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; itis only with the heart one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye" - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Using direct perception
to learn the powers of plants
is not a spectator sport.

"Every true vegetalista has to meet
Sacha Runa, the forest person,
face to face, in the Jungle."
- Dale Pendell

Eventually you have to move from looking,
and go into feeling,
realizing that feeling is a sense, too.
Not the touch of the fingers,
but the touch of the heart.
This kind of touch
has another dimension,
deeper than just that
possessed by the fingers.

and as we touch,
so are we touched

Everything has a hidden face.
Hidden, not in the sense
that it is intentionally concealed,
but in that it can only be seen
with different eyes
than the physical.
A different mode of perception
must be used.
The hidden face of Nature
can only be seen with the heart.

As you sit with the plant,
focusing on its sensory atrributes,
begin to
slow
down
now.

Become aware of the feelings
that arise in you
as you sit by the plant.
How do YOU feel?
Now you are learning to see
- not merely the physical form of things,
but the meanings
that each thing expresses.

Everything we encounter
in the wildness of the world
gives off its own
electromagnetic pulse
of communication.
These waveforms are filled with meanings,
living communications that touch us
and that we experience
as feelings.

"At dessert, Goethe had a laural, in full flower, and a Japanese plant, placed before us on the table. I remarked what different feelings were excited by the two plants - that the sight of the laurel produced a cheerful, light, mild, and tranquil mood; but that of the Japanese plant, one of barbaric melancholy."
- Johann Peter Eckermann

Because we have been taught
for so long
to disregard these kind of feelings,
it may be hard
to let yourself notice them.

Begin by allowing yourself
to describe
these plant-generated feelings
in any way they come to you.
Take the step of letting them come
into consciousness
and emerge into words.
Do not control the words
or make them big and analytical.
Let them emerge of themselves,
in their own form.
Give yourself permission
to say out loud
what they are,
no matter how foolish
they might seem
to your linear mind.

"It is a rare qualification to be able ...
to conceive and suffer
the truth
to pass through us
living and intact."

- Henry David Thoreau

[Mika]

Because of our long habituation
in the linear mind
and the things we have been taught
about the livingness
of the world,
this is the hardest thing of all -
to give reality to the feelings
that flow into us from the world itself.

A two thousand-year-old tree
in an ecosystem filled
with a
tumultuous,
complex,
riot
of interacting plant species
feels
markedly different
than a lone sapling
surrounded by grass,
stark in the front yard
of a new housing development,
or the Norfolk pine
leaning drunkenly
in the corner of the kitchen.

The green,
orderly
lawns
surrounding children's homes
do not bear any relationship
to the up-and-down,
uneven landscapes
filled with giant,
craggy outcroppings
of the immeasureably ancient stones of Earth
that wild landscapes often possess.

A calm pond lends us serenity,
yet when its waters
are disturbed
by wind
are we not also disturbed?
our emotions unsettled?

Where is it
that our feelings
really come from?


Giving reality to the feelings
that come to us
from the world directly contradicts
the Western insistence
on the linar mind
and the (presumed) unreality
of the living soulfulness
of the world around us.
Doing so breaks
a cultural agreement
that is powerful and strong
and deeply embedded within us.

"We have lost the response of the heart to what is presented to the senses."
- James Hillman

Embracing the reality of feelings
that come to us from the world
is the first step
in the decolonization of the soul.
In this moment,
the linear mind
is truly left behind.
This is the moment you begin
to use a different mode of cognition-
the moment you begin to think
with your heart.

the third step

Most of us have been taught
that feelings only come from within us.
For those of us
who wish to learn directly from
the wildness of the world,
to learn directly from plants
the medicinal uses they posssess,
it is essential to begin
to feel with the heart.

To do so you must go
to meet the plant
with your most vulnerable self.
You must open your heart
and the let the plant's
living communications flow into you,
weave through you.
You must recieve
what it has to offer.

Leave the well-worn road
you have traveled so long.
Have the courage to speak
the intangible.

to write it down in a journal

Write out all the feelings your notice now.
Let yourself say them
without trying to make them pretty,
grown up, or elegant.

There will be one or more primary feelings;
mad, sad, glad, or scared.
Then a number of secondary feelings:
a unique blending
of the primary feelings
into more sublte forms,
like the million blendings of colors
from an artist's palette.
These secondary feelings
are encodes
of more complex communications
from the plant.
Just as plants create primary and secondary chemistries,
they create primary and secondary electromagnetic pulses,
primary and secondary feelings.

As it feels the impacts
of these feelings complexes,
your body will respond
at a level deeper than your conscious awareness.
There will be an immediate
physical articulation
in response to what your are sensing.

Your body's response
can be exceptionally subtle

Because it is out of your consciuos awareness,
you must notice everything
that your body does
during this process,
everything you feel,
every stry thought
that comes into your head,
no matter how insignificant,
unrelated,
or ridiculous it seems.

You are learning a new language now.
In this process,
your body is your best friend
and most important teacher.
You must learn to honor it once more,
to not denigrate or distrust it
as you have been taught in school.
It knows and will teach you.
If you let it.
If you respect it.

"it makes a wonderful difference whether we find in the body an ally or an adversary." - Goethe

So pay attention
to everything that your body does
as you sit with the plant,
everything you think
and everything you feel.
Cultivate a perceptive awareness
of all these responses,
learn to be senstive
to the least movements
of your self
in all the forms this may take.
Write it all down.

And give up your preconceptions.
For if you have an assumption
about the form
in which the knowledge will appear,
you will overlook
much that is important.

"The young woman beckoned to me, upset.
"What is it?" I asked.
She took my arm, let me to a sheltered spot.
"I tried the exercise," she said, taking a deep breath,
"and nothing happened."
She brought her hands to her chest,
took another deep breath,
seemed about to cry.
"Really" I asked.
"Yes, I tried it," she said,
placing her hands on her chest again,
taking another deep breath.
"Nothing happened."
"How do you feel?"
"Sad" she said.
"What plant did you sit with" I asked her.
"That one over there. Mullein," she said,
pointing it out where it stood,
its high stalk gently moving in the breeze.
"But don't you know that mullein is used for the lungs,
for helping breathing to be more easy? Deeper?"
"No," she said, looking confused.
"And people hold a lot of sadness in their lungs.
They close them down, compress them,
so they won't feel the sadness sometimes."
I took her hands gently, said,
"It is no accident that you are breathing more deeply,
that you are about to cry.
Every time you speak of the plant
you breathe deeply and touch your chest,
you lungs and heart.
You must learn to pay attention to everything
that happens.
The plant-human communication
is always language.
It is not always words."

[Mika]

All phenomena,
when focused upon,
will generate an intimation
of a particular mood or quality within you.
We are daily touched by the world
within which we are embedded,
we feel that touch upon us
in the thousands of nameless feelings
we experience each day.
They flit over the surface
of our consciousness
like shadows across grassy meadow.
In paying attention to them,
they come forward
into consciousness
and begin to reveal their secrets,
for each emotion
registers the impact
of a particular meaing
that has touched us.
They are transforms of information,
of communications,
from the world around us.
These transforms
contain extremely condensed
and elegant communications
about what we are encountering.

"Though the gods have the power of speech
more often they choose a flower or plant:
elder leaves pressed on a blotter,
or spring buds emerging from a winter stem

These messages they send -
so ordinary we usually miss them:
as easy laughter and lightness,
or legs casually crossed and touching

The way a sperpentine dike blends seamlessly into bedrock
or the way tow possible lvoers move,
starting and stopping, passing and pausing,
on an April trail

The subtlest oracles are always the most obviuos -
seeing what is clearly in front of us the most difficult:
a butterfly hatching from a ruptured dream,
or a splintered tree rooting in the soil where it fell"

- Dale Pendell

Paying attention to the feelings of things
and writing them down
is a good beginning.
It starts to train you in a specific skill.
It is like learning to rida a bicycle

or a unicycle

It takes a lot of practice to gain facility with it,
to find the balance point,
to trust yourself to it.
After all,
the experts have been telling you
your whole life
that there is nothing out there,
no communications,
no intelligence,
no meaning,
no sacredness
or soul.

Still,
our ancestors walked this way before us.
We are meant to feel the touch
of the world upon us.

"The true was already found ... long ago." - Goethe

[CyanRachel]

Kaltxi, Mika.
All this stuff about spirituality and plants is very interesting -- Irayo for sharing it with us and posting passages from the book you read.

[Theorist]

Is there a place where one can get this book?

[apache_blanca]

Originally Posted by Theorist

Is there a place where one can get this book?

How about Amazon.com : http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Teachin.../dp/1591430356

Ooh, and a video about this book:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxDjDNV3fh8

Thanks for the post Mika!

Quote a letter from one penpal:
My mother spent plenty of time socializing with her house plants as well as the vegetables in our garden. She had the ability to take one of the neighbor's dead plants and bring it back to life bigger & better; she could grow things in her garden that no one else could for miles around. Nature was her gift but she never realized it.
unquote.
Well... I think she did, even tho maybe subconsciously. My grandma used to talk to her geraniums, too, & they grew like some jungle plants on her windowsill, geraniums were common but nobody else had them grow that huge & healthy. Love is a very potent vitamin.

It reminds me of one situation from The Teachings of Don Juan: one day, Don Juan took Carlos to the mountains to look for medicinal plants. As the old shaman walked, he touched & stroked plants on his way & mumbled something. Then he kneeled in a particular spot, whispered & talked for a while, & picked up a little flower, & told Carlos to do the same: to greet the plant, to explain his purpose, to say that he needed his help, to say sorry for the hurt & promise that, after he died, his body would serve as food for the plant's relatives. Carlos kneeled but he felt exceptionally stupid talking to a plant. So he stood up without saying anything. Don Juan gave him good grief for "being so full of self-importance that he didn't even had a courtesy to say 'thank you' to a plant that might happen to be the only remedy in miles against, say, a snake's bite". It took Carlos a very long time to see what Don Juan could see... but eventually he got there.