Stephen Harrod Buhner - Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

For Flick

The night comes too soon for those we love

Thanks are gratefully extended to the following publishers and authors for permission to reprint:

From LSD: My Problem Child by Albert Hofmann. Copyright 1980 Albert Hofmann. Published by McGraw-Hill, New York. Used by permission of MAPS.

From Kabir: Ecstatic Poems by Robert Bly. Copyright 2004 by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.

Translation of poem by Anthony Machado from News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness by Robert Bly. Copyright 1980 by Robert Bly. Published by Sierra Club Books, San Francisco. Used by permission of Robert Bly.

William Stafford, A Ritual to Read to Each Other, from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems. Copyright 1960, 1998, by William Stafford and the Estate of William Stafford. Reprinted with the permission of the Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota; www.graywolfpress.org; and the William Stafford Estate.

Medicine from Living with Barbarians: A Few Plant Poems by Dale Pendell. Copyright 1999 by Dale Pendell. Published by Wild Ginger Press, Sebastopol, California. Used by permission of the author.

Lyrics to Anastasia from Mysterious Light, by Don Conoscenti. Copyright 2000 by Don Conoscenti. Reprinted by permission of the artist.

From Damaged Goods, a novel in progress, by Benjamin Bailey-Buhner. Copyright 2013 by Benjamin Bailey-Buhner. Reprinted by permission of the author.

The Movement of Great Things from The Taste of Wild Water. Copyright 2009 by Stephen Harrod Buhner. Published by Raven Press, Silver City, N.M. Reprinted by permission of the author. For Julie.

PLANT
INTELLIGENCE
AND THE
IMAGINAL REALM

The twentieth century was the great age of physics, and the twenty-first is the age of biology. According to Stephen Harrod Buhner, we must interact empathically with the biosphere by opening our perceptual gates to perceive through all body sensations. He deliciously explores music, writing, art, and plants as tools for reclaiming our feeling sense of nature. Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm is a work of heartfelt wisdom written so exquisitely that it took my breath away, a must read for anyone who wants to achieve keystone intelligenceempathic immersion within Earths dreaming.

BARBARA HAND CLOW, AUTHOR OF AWAKENING THE PLANETARY MIND: BEYOND THE TRAUMA OF THE PAST TO A NEW ERA OF CREATIVITY

Stephen Harrod Buhners The Lost Language of Plants and The Secret Teaching of Plants taught a generation of herbalists to trust our sense that the world was alive and speaking to us. Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm takes us further down that path of remembering and re-enchantment, awakening our capacity to tap directly in to the Gaian mind. Be warned: if you read this book, you will never be the same again.

SEAN DONAHUE, TRADITIONAL HERBALIST AND INSTRUCTOR, SCHOOL OF WESTERN HERBAL MEDICINE AT PACIFIC RIM COLLEGE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For those who have written about the journey, taking it themselves, refusing to settle for secondhand gods. My students who for the past thirty-five years have also been my teachers. And: Benjamin Bailey-Buhner, Mary Brown (on bass), Phil Brown (on lead guitar and vocals), Tom Clemens, Kevin Compton (on blues guitar), Don Conoscenti (the greatest unknown musician in the United States), Eric Hansen (on vocals), Julie McIntyre, Harry Pickens (on piano), Calixte Raifsnider, Erika May Randolph (on flute), Trishuwa, and, of course, Melanie and Jeff at the Buck-horn (who make playing out like playing at home), Linda and Shelly at the Mine Shaft in Madrid (ditto), and Rodney Henderson (who makes us smile when he drums).

A NOTE TO THE READER

Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who dont believe in magic will never find it.

ROALD DAHL

T his book is a users manual about the techniques and states of perception necessary for directly interacting with the Gaian system, perceiving the deeper patterns in Gaian movements, and understanding the meanings within those patterns. In many respects it is a manual for becoming a nondomesticated explorer of the natural world, something that used to be called, long ago, a natural philosopher, what might now be called a wild scientist as opposed to a domesticated one.

Unlike the majority of books being written about the state of Earth/human relationship and the problems that face us, this book does not list all the troubles and then, at the end, call for more regulation, urge you to write your congressional representative, insist you recycle or buy an (absurdly expensive) environmentally friendly car, or plead for you to give money to nonprofits. As Einstein so eloquently put it, We cant solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. So, this book is about how to actually think differently, the processes involved, and how they will alter your perceptual frame if you use them. It then urges you to do one thing: whatever the hell it is that you think you should do in response. It is in your own individual genius that the answers lie, not in the pronouncements of experts who have no conception of the local environment in which you live every day of your life. Letting the experts run things is how we got into this mess to begin with.

Thus this book is specifically meant for those who understand what it means to look with glittering (i.e., luminous) eyes. For that is the understanding that binds us together, that lies at the heart of thinking differently. If you are a mechanicalist or die-hard reductionist (or even someone who thinks humans are somehow innately different, i.e., more special, than all other life-forms on this planet) this book will only irritate you, upset your stomach, and cause you to mutter over and over again, Wrong! Wrong! Please read Richard Dawkins instead.

Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm is the fourth in a series of five (or perhaps six, or seven, or eight) books that began, long ago, with Sacred Plant Medicine (Inner Traditions, 1996), and which also includes The Lost Language of Plants (Chelsea Green, 2002) and The Secret Teachings of Plants (Inner Traditions, 2004). (Note: Lost Language contains a depth look at chemical communication among plants and their ecosystems; Secret Teachings a depth look at heart perception, synchronization of heart fields, and EM field dynamics.) As with those latter two works, some of the material in this book, especially in the first half, is somewhat technical. That density exists as part of a long-term project to create a map of human interaction with the natural world that actually has something to do with the real world, an area in which our current maps, inherited from the late nineteenth century, are tremendously deficient. You dont have to read those partsyou can just skip around if you wish. In fact, I urge you to have fun and from now on take in what has relevance to you and to ignore the rest. After all, its your life, you should spend it how you