Shamanism, which is the art of consciously communicating with spirit worlds, is another one of the skills that went underground in the western European cultures with the dominance of Christianity and science. It was resurrected for us by Michael Harner, an anthropologist, who was befriended by shamans in the indigenous cultures he was visiting and studying in the 1960's. What Harner realized is that, although each culture had its own ritual and ceremonial ways of practicing shamanism, some of which involved using psychotropic substances, in essence, it is an act of the creative imagination that connects human perception to spirit worlds.

Harner then established the Institute of Shamanic Studies to teach what he called „core shamanism“. It was in a seminar presented by some instructors from the Shamanic Institute that I first started to do shamanic journies to spirit worlds. Our instructions were to enter shamanic realms to meet either animal or angelic or ancestral spirit guides. And so for many years, my spirit world communications were with these Beings. It never occurred to me, at that time, to try to communicate with plant spirits.

In 1973, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird published The Secret Life of Plants.

The first story they tell in the book is about Cleve Backster, who ran a school for polygraph examiners, where he taught the art of lie detection to policemen and security agents from around the world. One night, in 1966, on impulse, he decided to attach the lie detector to his plant and much to his surprise, he got a read out that correlated directly with his thoughts and intentions. Over the next several months and years he was able to demonstrate remarkable perception, intelligence, memory, and distance communication with plants.

One simple demonstration he performed involved getting a person to decide on a number between one and ten. In the presence of a plant connected to the lie detector, he then asked, „Is the number one? Two? And so on“. The person was instructed to answer „no“ each time. Invariably, the plant reacted to the lie about the chosen number, the polygraph read out showing pronounced squiggles, though human witnesses could not detect any difference in the spoken answers.

His experiments became quite elaborate as time went on, demonstating among other things, that plants in his laboratory would react to emotional states he was experiencing while far away from home.

His work got quite a bit of publicity and other people set up laboratories to try to duplicate his experiments. Many of these efforts produced no results. No matter what they did to the plants, there were no recordable reactions on the polygraphs.

When questioned about this, Backster explained that it was important to have an intimate loving relationship with the plants and that even his plants would sometimes „faint“ or refuse to respond, most notably when certain people came into the room. On one such occasion, when all the print-outs suddenly went flat in the presence of a visiting scientist, Backster asked the man what he did with plants. The man explained that part of his study was to kill plants by roasting them, to measure and analyse the dry weight that was left over. As soon as this man left the room, all the print-outs returned to show normal activity.

Again, what I am understanding is that the plants are choosing who and when they communicate and co-operate with. Every person Tompkins talks about in his book, who got significant information from living plants, tells about the love they feel for the plants, how love is part of the process of working with plant sentience. This loving approach is universally important for getting results from living plants.

Tompkins describes in great detail significant studies about plant sentience from around the world. Bose, a scientist in India in the late 1800's was measuring electromagnetic responses in plants. Goethe, a German poet who died in 1832, was convinced there was a soul essence to nature and plants. His belief inspired many European thinkers and scientists. In the 1950's a man and wife team of photagraphers in the Soviet Union developed a method of photographing auric fields, of humans and plants. And it continues, as various people all over the world developed more and more ways of perceiving and measuring unseen energies and realizing that plants are engaged in conscious ways with these energies. People studied what sorts of music plants prefered, rigged up aparatuses so plants could trigger their own watering times and amounts, studied plant relationship to sunlight, the planets and the stars. Tompkins hammers it home, page after page with tediously documented research reports, that plants are sentient beings who interact intelligently and intimately with their environments which include human thoughts and intentions.