Shara Saunders

“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

“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

“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

“Jagadis Bose, who developed some of the earliest work on plant neurobiology in the early 1900s, treated plants with a wide variety of chemicals to see what would happen. In one instance, he covered large, mature trees with a tent then chloroformed them. (The plants breathed in the chloroform through their stomata, just as they would normally breathe in air.) Once anesthetized, the trees could be uprooted and moved without going into shock. He found that morphine had the same effects on plants as that of humans, reducing the plant pulse proportionally to the dose given. Too much took the plant to the point of death, but the administration of atropine, as it would in humans, revived it. Alcohol, he found, did indeed get a plant drunk. It, as in us, induced a state of high excitation early on but as intake progressed the plant began to get depressed, and with too much it passed out. and it had a hangover the next day Irrespective of the chemical he used, Bose found that the plant responded identically to the human; the chemicals had the same effect on the plants nervous systems as it did the human. This really should not be surprising. The neurochemicals in our bodies were used in every life-form on the planet long before we showed up. They predate the emergence of the human species by hundreds of millions of years. They must have been doing something all that time, you know, besides waiting for us to appear.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth