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Shara Saunders

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“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

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“Each triangulation is different, each a different measurement (or number) of distance. There are numerous implications in this. Here are three of them: 1) mathematical relationships that are inherent in Universe can be perceived, and utilized, by more organisms than the human; 2) numbering systems are arbitrary and are only metaphors for those mathematical relationships—they are not foundational; 3) organisms other than the human not only have the capacity to perceive distance but also differentials—they can add and subtract; 4) they possess a sense of congruency—they know when they have the right answer—and the wrong one.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

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“[W]hen food is placed at the start and end points of the maze, the slime mold withdraws from the dead-end corridors and shrinks its body to a tube spanning the shortest path between food sources. The single-celled slime solves the maze in this way each time it is tested.”23 Toshiyuki Nakagaki, the researcher conducting the study, commented that Even for humans it is not easy to solve a maze. But the plasmodium of true slime mold, an amoeba-like organism, has shown an amazing ability to do so. This implies that an algorithm and a high computing capacity are included in the unicellular organism.24 This capacity for mathematical differentiation and computation is wide spread. All self-organized biological systems possess it. One of the more amazing examples is the Clark’s Nutcracker.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

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“The white pines, like all pines, are wind pollinated. But unlike most pines, whose seeds are carried from the cones to the Earth by the wind (which limits their spread), the white pines seeds are carried to new locations, up to ten miles away, by birds and there they are planted in the ground at exactly the right depth for optimum sprouting. The seeds that the birds do not eat, and they very rarely eat all of them, germinate, and grow new pines. This is how the pine forest spreads to new locations.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

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“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

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