Stephen Harrod Buhner > Quotes

“Continually trying to look on the bright side interferes with our finding the wisdom that lies in the fruitful darkness. Continually striving upward toward the light means we never grow downward into our own feet, never become firmly rooted on the earth, never explore the darkness within and around us, a darkness without whose existence the light would have no meaning.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Fasting Path: For Spiritual, Emotional, and Physical Healing and Renewal

“Fifteen years ago I had an odd dream. In it, a medicinal plant that I was interested in, an Usnea lichen that is ubiquitous on trees throughout the world, told me that while it was good for healing human lungs it was primarily a medicine for the lungs of the planet, the trees. When I awoke, I was amazed. It had never occurred to me in quite that way that plants have some life and purpose outside their use to human beings.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner

“In this process of unlearning, in the process of feeling and hearing the plants again, one comes to realize many things. And of these things, perhaps stronger than the others, one feels the pain of the Earth. It is not possible to escape it.
One of the most powerful experiences I had of this was the year when I traveled to the Florida panhandle. One day Trishuwa and I decided to go out and make relationship with the plants and offer prayer to them. The place we chose appeared quite lush, with huge trees and thick undergrowth. But as we sat there, a strong anger came from the land and the trees. They had little use for us and told us so in strong language. We spoke with them for a long time and did not cower away from their rage and eventually, as we received their pain and anger, they calmed down a little. They told us that we could do our ceremonies if we wished and that they appreciated the thought but that it would do no good. It was too late for that place, it could not be helped, the land would take its revenge for the damage done to it and nothing would stop it. I wondered then how everyone who lived in the area could just go on with their daily lives when this communication from all the local living things was crying out so loudly. I wondered if anyone else felt this rage and anger.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Sacred Plant Medicine: The Wisdom in Native American Herbalism

“James Hillman so eloquently put it, “It was only when science convinced us that nature was dead that it could begin its autopsy in earnest.” A living, aware, and soul-filled world does not respond well to autopsy.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“Symbiogenesis is the formation of more complex life-forms from the union of two dissimilar, simpler ones.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“Part of the major problem attending schizophrenia is what it is defined to be, that is, abnormal, rather than an altered state of consciousness that has a specific ecological function for the species. In the West such states are labeled as an illness and are almost always medicated. Most psychoactive drug use is proscribed for exactly the same reason . . . You must not extend perception further than the society wants it to go There are very few people in the West (and virtually none who are clinically schooled) who understand how to train someone in the use of that enhanced perception. Once such gating dynamics are labeled abnormal, accepted to be neuropathological, there is generally no alternative (in that system) except pharmaceutical suppression.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“Is the soul solid, like iron? Or is it tender and breakable, like the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl? Who has it, and who doesn’t? I keep looking around me. The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus. The swan opens her white wings slowly. In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness. One question leads to another. Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg? Like the eye of a hummingbird? Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop? Why should I have it, and not the anteater who loves her children? Why should I have it, and not the camel? Come to think of it, what about the maple trees? What about the blue iris? What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight? What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves? What about the grass? —Mary Oliver, “Some Questions You Might Ask”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicine to Life on Earth

“The system begins to display something other than synchronicity, it begins to act as a unit, to have behaviors. And just as a study of the parts of a self-organized whole cannot give an idea of the larger whole’s nature, so too the study of the smaller parts’ behaviors cannot give an idea of the larger system’s behavior. As Camazine et al. note, “an emergent property cannot be understood simply by examining in isolation the properties of the system’s components. . . . Emergence refers to a process by which a system of interacting subunits acquires qualitatively new properties that cannot be understood as a simple addition of their individual contributions.”6 Or as systems researcher Yaneer Bar-Yam puts it, “A complex system is formed out of many components whose behavior is emergent, that is, the behavior of the system cannot be simply inferred from the behavior of its components. . . . Emergent properties cannot be studied by physically taking a system apart and looking at the parts (reductionism).”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“There are webs of complexity that tie everything together, and they are more numerous than the stars in the night sky. At the moment of self-organization of the bacterial membrane, complex feedback loops, both interoceptive and exteroceptive, immediately formed. Information from both locations began traveling in a huge, never-ending river composed of trillions upon trillions of bytes of data to the self-organized, more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts living system that had come into being. The system began, in that instant of self-organization, to modulate both its interior and exterior worlds in order to maintain its state. It began to modulate its environment.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“All the complex life-forms that we see were formed through symbiogenesis, a term coined by the person who first recognized its existence, Lynn Margulis.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“One finding is important for understanding the nature of our sexuality as men. That is that male infants, in the womb, have regular erections—so do male infants after birth. Our sexuality is as much a part of us as breathing, our need for food, our need for love.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Natural Testosterone Plan: For Sexual Health and Energy

“Lynn Margulis comments, “Most bacteria have far more important things to do on this Earth than to devour our tissues while we are still alive, drink our blood when we are old and weak, or fight with us over who will eat our food first. . . . Those who hate and want to kill bacteria indulge in self-hatred. Our ultimate ancestors, yours and mine, descended from this group of beings. Not only are bacteria our ancestors, but also . . . as the evolutionary antecedent of the nervous system, they invented consciousness.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“The mitochondria in our cells, that power our metabolism, were formerly free living bacteria, as are the chloroplasts that power those of plants. All complex life-forms are generated through just this kind of cooperative joining, over long evolutionary time, with information built upon information, complexity always increasing in order to more fully stabilize the system. And all such symbiogenic joinings produce life-forms that are not only more complex but whose capacities cannot be predicted from a study of the parts that joined together.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“In other words, what you believe—that is, the descriptions of the world around you that you received in childhood—act much like software; they program what is perceivable by your conscious mind.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“Even more important is the way complex systems seem to strike a balance between the need for order and the imperative for change. Complex systems tend to locate themselves at a place we call “the edge of chaos.” We imagine the edge of chaos as a place where there is enough innovation to keep a living system vibrant, and enough stability to keep it from collapsing into anarchy. It is a zone of conflict and upheaval, where the old and new are constantly at war. Finding the balance point must be a delicate matter—if a living system drifts too close, it risks falling over into incoherence and dissolution; but if the system moves too far away from the edge, it becomes rigid, frozen, totalitarian. Both conditions lead to extinction. . . . Only at the edge of chaos can complex systems flourish.8 This threshold line, that edge between anarchy and frozen rigidity, is not a like a fence line, it is a fractal line; it possesses nonlinearity.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“The self-organized bacterial membrane that is Gaia has constantly, over very long time lines, increased the complexity of its structure in order to stabilize itself and to more effectively deal with perturbations to the system.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“My other teachers did not seem to care about the challenge of being human and instead they taught us to think about mathematics and analyze different chemicals and as the months went by I felt further from myself. And the only thing that seemed to make sense was Ben Sweet and the way he talked to us and urged something in the deeps of us to come out—the way he looked, and listened, as if he had no other place on this Earth to be except with us, as if there were nothing more important in his life than what we had to say at just that moment in time.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“Gaia does not use top-down control over the parts that make up the whole. that approach is the least adaptable and least functional of all”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“Albert Hofmann once put it . . . All attempts today to make amends for the damage through environmentally protective measures must remain only hopeless, superficial patchwork, if no curing of the “Western entelechy neurosis” ensues. . . . Healing would mean existential experience of a deeper, self-encompassing reality.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“Invasive plants—Earth’s way of insisting we notice her medicines.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“One of our greatest fears is to eat the wildness of the world.

Our mothers intuitively understood something essential: the green is poisonous to civilization. If we eat the wild, it begins to work inside us, altering us, changing us. Soon, if we eat too much, we will no longer fit the suit that has been made for us. Our hair will begin to grow long and ragged. Our gait and how we hold our body will change. A wild light begins to gleam in our eyes. Our words start to sound strange, nonlinear, emotional. Unpractical. Poetic.

Once we have tasted this wildness, we begin to hunger for a food long denied us, and the more we eat of it the more we will awaken.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature

“For example, during studies focused on interpreting meaning it was found that continued focus on the meaning in words (which uses visual, auditory, and feeling senses) enhances the future ability to determine meaning irrespective of the medium conveying it. However if the focus is shifted to classifying letters by shape (which restricts the sensory modality to the visual only), the ability to determine meaning decreases. In other words, focus on form inhibits the ability to determine the meanings that underlie form.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“To know how cherries and strawberries taste, ask children and birds. GOETHE”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“For their neural networks to function, plants use virtually the same neurotransmitters we do, including the two most important: glutamate and GABA (gamma aminobutyric acid). They also utilize, as do we, acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin, melatonin, epinephrine, norepinephrine, levodopa, indole-3-acetic acid, 5-hydroxyindole acetic acid, testosterone (and other androgens), estradiol (and other estrogens), nicotine, and a number of other neuroactive compounds. They also make use of their plant-specific neurotransmitter, auxin, which, like serotonin, for example, is synthesized from tryptophan. These transmitters are used, as they are in us, for communication within the organism and to enhance brain function.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“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”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart

“Neuroimaging in the brain shows that once the areas of the brain that process incoming sensory data are sensitized to incoming data, that is, once the gating channels are opened more widely, the sections of the brain that gate that particular type of sensory data stay open. The baseline gating level increases even if the degree of sensory stimulus is not increased. The metaphysical background of the world begins to emerge into sensing on a regular basis.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“Golda looked back at me—those peaceful eyes!—and said in the most penetrating voice I had ever heard, ‘Because the Nazis taught me this: There is a Hitler inside each of us and if we do not heal the Hitler inside of ourselves, then the violence, it will never stop.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“Some of the earliest self-organized systems that formed after bacteria were the bacterial biofilms. essentially small clusters of bacteria who live together These occurred throughout the world, and later, as the colonies grew larger, they merged together to create the biosphere. Biofilms, when closely examined, are, in essence, three-dimensional physical structures—a type of bacterial city. They are created by single or multiple bacterial species, and allow the bacteria to more easily regulate their environment, moving it toward what is optimum for their survival, much the same as our cities do for us.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“3) if you wish, you can shift consciousness itself more directly by directly increasing the apertures of your sensory gates, by opening the doors of perception themselves more widely. You can do this a number of ways, hallucinogens are one of them meditation is another habituation to constantly feeling the touch of the world upon you is another”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

“Luther Burbank could directly work with plants to co-create most of the food plants we now take for granted is that he routinely accessed earlier developmental stages, in essence, taking them on as a lens through which to experience the world. This shifted his sensory gating dynamics, opening the doors of perception much wider, allowing a much richer sensory perception to occur. It allowed him to work with the metaphysical background directly. As Helen Keller once remarked of him . . . He has the rarest of gifts, the receptive spirit of a child. Only a wise child can understand the language of flowers and trees.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth