Sometimes it happens that a person can name the exact moment when his or her life changed irrevocably. For Cleve Backster, it was early in the morning of February 2, 1966, at thirteen minutes, fifty-five seconds into a polygraph test he was administering. Backster, a leading polygraph expert whose Backster Zone Comparison Test is the worldwide standard for lie detection, had at that moment threatened his test subject's well-being. The subject had responded electrochemically to his threat. The subject was a plant.
Since then, Backster has conducted hundreds of experiments demonstrating not only that plants respond to our emotions and intents, but so do severed leaves, eggs (fertilized or not), yogurt, and human cell samples. He's found, for example, that white cells taken from a person's mouth and placed in a test tube still respond electrochemically to the donor's emotional states, even when the donor is out of the room, out of the building, or out of the state.
I first read about Backster's work when I was a kid. His observations verified an understanding I had then, an understanding not even a degree in physics could later eradicate: that the world is alive and sentient.
Derrick Jensen, The Plants Respond: An Interview with Cleve Backster in The Sun Magazine
A fascinating, compelling interview with a scientist who has been conducting experiments into the nature of consciousness - a controversial subject then, and still so now. And one of the most beautiful, to me. Well worth a read in its entirety.
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