On February 2nd 1966 Dr Cleve Backster discovered something wondrous. He was working with the CIA as one of their experts, using the polygraph or lie detector machine. His assistant had wanted to spruce up the office so bought him a dracaena plant. Having worked all night, at 7am on a coffee break he had an inspired but possibly preposterous idea. He looked at the plant, and looked at the polygraph then back to the plant. He thought to himself ‘I wonder if I can get readings off the plant in the same way I do for humans?’
Thought experiments on plants
He next plugged the electrodes to various leaves and started to watch the needle. Much to his surprise it did not generate a smooth, constant, steady reading, rather it was jagged and alive much like a humans would be. It looked just like it does for a human who was about to tell a lie.
The lie detector works by gauging the electrical activity in the skin, so if a human feels threatened or scared the needle on the polygraph spikes. It’s a fear response. Asking a guilty person if they for example “killed Joe Bloggs”? If they had, there would be a response, as the answer to this threatens their well being.
His next thought was how on earth do you threaten a plant? He dipped one of the leaves into his hot coffee, no response, he tapped a leaf with his pen, little happened.
This is where it gets interesting, he was about 15 feet away from the plant when the thought arose to burn one of the leaves with an electrode on it –the ultimate threat he thought to the plant.
It’s incredible, this is a major breakthrough in science and consciousness and yet still not a well known experiment.
The second he thought about setting fire to a leaf the lie detector spiked!
“The very moment the imagery of burning that leaf entered my mind, the polygraph recording pen moved rapidly to the top of the chart! No words were spoken, no touching the plant, no lighting of matches, just my clear intention to burn the leaf. The plants recording showed dramatic excitation. To me this was a powerful, high quality observation… I must state that, on February 2, 1966 at 13 minutes, 55 seconds into the chart recording, my whole consciousness changed. I then thought, ‘Gee it’s as if this plant read my mind!”
Plants have thoughts and feelings
The plant had what would be considered in human terms an ‘enormous panic reaction’. Dr Backster went to fetch matches from his secretary’s desk but felt bad for the plant as it still appeared to be alarmed according to the data. He lit a match and brought it near a leaf in a feeble attempt to complete the experiment but simply didn’t have the heart to go through with it fully. It wasn’t until he returned the matches to his secretary’s desk that the plant showed signs of stabilising back to a ‘relaxed’ state.
His colleague Bob Henson arrived at work at 9 AM and was unsurprisingly excited about the results and wanted to repeat the exercise for himself. Once again as soon as soon as Heston thought to burn the leaf the polygraph spiked. By this time Backster had developed a deep compassion for the plant and refused to let Heston actually burn it.
How on earth did the plant know that it was under threat? It was just a ‘thought’ in the Doctor’s head. This demonstrates the power of thought beautifully, just as we saw in my previous blog ‘Thoughts Affect Structure’ that refers to the work of Dr Masauru Emoto https://www.divineempowerment.co.uk/thoughts-affect-structure/.
We are what we think, our thoughts and intentions change the form of matter shown in the structure of snowflakes in Emotos work, they cause plants to have a fear or panic response. Our whole world around us is affected by what we think, what we believe physically changes our environment.
Be careful what you wish for, be careful what you think!
Be well, be happy.
Antonia