You'll want to pick up a copy of the September/October 2004 issue of Nexus Magazine, the bimonthly Australian metaphysical magazine that is available on most newsstands. There's an interview in it that's pretty incredible. Cleve Backster is a researcher who accidentally discovered in 1966 that if you hook up a polygraph machine to a plant, it will register spontaneous reactions to things that are happening in the environment around it. It even responds to people's thoughts and intentions.

So, say, if you're about to cut up a head of broccoli and you hook these polygraph sensors up to your house plant, the plant will register distress when the broccoli is being cut.

Backster's life work gets into more complex and varied experiments than the one I describe above, but you get the general idea. All of his work is so ground-breaking and controversial that, of course, science just can't deal with it. Scientists haven't been able to completely debunk his work because it is so consistent and clear. But they have a problem putting it into official scientific journals because Backster discovered something interesting - the plants respond to spontaneous thoughts and emotions, not rehearsed or fake ones. So "repeatability" in the scientific way of thinking is impossible to do with these plants. It's hard to duplicate this stuff in a traditional lab setting.

So if you sit there and TRY to think evil thoughts at your spider plant, it's not going to react. However, if your kid knocks something over in your home and you lash out in anger at him, the plant WILL respond to that. So spontaneous expressions of emotion are what the plants usually respond to.

Backster's work was quoted in a bestselling book called The Secret Life of Plants published in the 70's, but for the most part, his body of research has been kept under the radar. He rarely gives interviews, either, and the interview published in Nexus happened in 1997. It's fascinating. You have to read it!

Backster also has a new book out that he's written, the only book he's ever published, called Primary Perception. I haven't read it yet but I plan to. Primary Perception is the name he's given to this consciousness that plants would seem to exhibit. You can't give it a traditional sense name like sight, hearing, smell, etc. So he's called it Primary Perception.

Even more mind-boggling is how he has discovered that other organisms seem to display this same type of primary perception. He's found that these same responses exist in yogurt cultures, in eggs, in sperm, even in the collection of microbes that lurk down in your kitchen drain. (Now I know why I have such a resistance to housecleaning.)

The implications of his work are huge, since he's one of the few researchers out there finding evidence of the inter-linked consciousness of the beings of this earth. This is stuff, of course, that the mystics and shamans have been saying for aeons, but since they don't tend to run corporations and control what gets published in the mainstream media, their voice is too rarely heard.

Nexus Magazine is a great publication, if you're not familiar with it. It can get a little wacky, but then, wacky is good. Wacky makes us open our minds. And they have a lot of cutting edge alternative health research, many of them scary articles. (I sometimes get the impression that we should all become breatharians, subsisting only on air, since there's so much bad stuff in almost everything we usually eat.)

Nexus Magazine's site is: http://www.nexusmagazine.com

And Cleve Backster's book is Primary Perception: Biocommunication with Plants, Living Foods and Human Cells, White Rose Millennium Press, Anza, CA, USA, published in 2003. Backster's website: http://www.primaryperception.com

On a personal note, one of the reasons why I am writing about this subject today is that I had a moving dream two nights ago. In it, I was in a room with some house plants, and I suddenly said to them, "Sing for me!" I'm not sure why I commanded them to sing for me, but it seemed the thing to do in that particular dream.

The astonishing thing was that this group of house plants immediately responded in the dream, letting out with this full chorus of gorgeous sound that was unlike any music I'd ever heard with my earthly ears, but it was lovely. In the dream, I remember being struck by the reality of it, that plants really do have intelligence and can communicate and yes, they even have their own unique form of "music."

In the dream, I was so excited about connecting with the plants and hearing their multi-dimensional chorus for the first time, that I ran outside and asked the trees to sing. And they did! Suddenly, I was hearing a whole grove of trees singing to me, joyfully, in this amazing form of music that was different from anything I ever remembered hearing before.

In my daily life, I'm still exploring plant communication. I seem to have the most clarity in contact with elder trees, trees that are over 100 years old. Some of them are real characters, kind of like the town eccentric you'd meet sitting outside the country store at a town, the one who knows all of the history of what's happened in the local area and will happily give you all the gossip. I've learned stuff from elder trees that I was later able to verify through independent research, information about the various Indian tribes who used to live in the area, what they used to do, and stuff about the modern residents of the area.

I find that, even if you're comfortable with a mystical view of reality, that you have to inch up to plant communication gradually. We still have so many blockages in our heads about humans being the only intelligent species on this planet, and our egos too often want to put plant communication into this condescending box. "Well, I'll talk with a plant, but I'm sure it doesn't have anything worthwhile to tell me. I mean, how could it? It's a plant!"

I remember what a shaman friend of mine told me many years ago when I was just inching up to being able to communicate with plants. He told me, "Plants are more evolved than humans."

I was thrown by that one. "How can that be?"

"Well, think of what a plant can do."

"Hmm. It gives off shade?"

"Yeah. It can provide shelter from the elements. What else?"

"Um, some of them shed nuts or fruit..."

"Yeah. They can provide food. What else?"

"Um, I dunno."

"Many plants can heal. Think of willow bark, the oldest pain reliever known to man. Think about aloe, the burn healer. Think about all of the herbs that are perfectly synchronized to correct imbalances in our bodies."

"So plants are also healers?"

"Right. Now, if they provide shelter, food, and healing - can you do any of that?"

"Hmm. I guess not."

He made his point. Plants and trees are very special beings. They may not "speak" to us in a manner that we're sensitized to, but they are active, conscious, and intelligent beings with skill sets that we humans lack.

We have a lot to learn from these quiet, faithful friends.

And personally, I'd just like to hear them sing again. I want to be in a reality where the gorgeous plant song that I heard in my dream becomes a daily event. I get the sense that someday not too far off in the future, it will!

I encourage you to check out Backster's amazing book. If you click through and purchase it at Amazon, you help to support future articles and more juicy content at this site. Every click is welcome!

Primary Perception: Biocommunication With Plants, Living Foods and Human Cells