Excerpt - The Secret Life of Plants

The following is about Cleve Backster's work in detecting connections in consciousness among people, plants, eggs, yogurt, animals and even insects. See also "Primary Perception" by Cleve Backster. After reading this, you may wonder if a spider's detection of 'food' trapped in its web is limited to the subtle wiggling of the web like we've been taught.

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"Backster was able to demonstrate to a group at Yale that the movements of a spider is the same room with a plant wired to his [polygraph] equipment could cause dramatic changes in the recorded pattern generated by the plant just before the spider started to scamper away from a human attempting to restrict its movement. "It seems" said Backster, "as if each of the spider's decisions to escape was being picked up by the plant, causing a reaction in the leaf.

"Under normal circumstances, plants may be attuned to each other, said Backster, though when encountering animal life they tend to pay less attention to what another plant may be up to. "The last thing a plant expects is another plant to give it trouble. So long as there is animal life around, they seem to be attuned to animal life. Animals and people are mobile, and could need careful monitoring.

"If a plant is threatened with overwhelming danger or damage, Backster observed that it reacts self-defensively in a way similar to an opossum - or, indeed, a human being - by "passing  out" or going into a deep faint. " - page 7

"Byrd's research supports Backster's observations that plants exhibit a quality of awareness and an empathy to other orgainisms that are stimulated in their presence. Like Backster, Byrd also found a major problem in his experiments to be the plant's tendency to "Faint" under excess stress, suddenly ceasing to respond even to the most basic stimuli, such as a light and heat. Like Backster and Sauvin, Byrd was able to demonstrate on television a plant's reaction to various stimuli, including his intent to burn it. On camara Byrd got a plan to respond to his shaking a spider in a pill box. The plant responded with about a second's delay, the response continuing as long as a minute. He also got a strong reaction when cutting the leaf from another plant." - page 41

- The Secret Life of Plants, by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird

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(Video Duration: 6:54)