We often think here that somehow human consciousness is itself a unique quantity. We speak about humans as unique in the world, that special species that has risen up to be “above” all other life forms. I am here to tell you that experience has shown me that we don’t live in a world where the physical universe has offered up unique differences in consciousness because of a lucky roll of the dice or an evolutionary effect that has managed to somehow provided more goods to one species over another. While it is true on the surface that different life forms show different capacities physically, the root of what drives all of this is not different. I have seen instead that everything has consciousness and that at least right now in our technological development, consciousness is ideal for exploring the field of consciousness that exists in other life forms. I will add that even matter itself, the very atoms, are composed of units of consciousness that are part of the divine drama of consciousness turning itself into matter (which I will touch on later).

So far, I have never experienced a life form through remote viewing or conscious probing or scanning where that consciousness was fundamentally different from my own. There were differences in how the energy of consciousness might be used in small ways, but never, not even once, in larger more significant over-arching ways. Since I am always looking for evidence for my many experiments into the realm of the numinous, into studying consciousness, I have found that I have gotten some tantalizing clues that seem to show me that consciousness really isn’t that different between us and, say, plants. It has struck me how similarly plants feel, how vividly animals feel emotion and express themselves in not too different ways than we do. While the differences may seem broad, if you go to the root of every consciousness be it atom or cell or species, there is the very same sense of feeling-based awareness. In fact, I suspect that we need this feeling-based awareness in order to properly interact with the matrix of matter that is itself consciousness that has transformed itself cleverly into what we call matter.

I have been reading the human energy field since I was 18 years old. It has taught me that our thoughts and feelings are composed of energy, just like physical matter is. As a result, what we normally think of as nonphysical consciousness has a basis in physics, the study of the physical world. If thoughts and feelings are energy, which they certainly are (even if you go by the purely mechanistic view of thoughts being electrical activity in the brain) then it begins to make sense that we can study this phenomenon (which of course we do through EEG’s and other measurement methods). In my case, I was keen to study the results of my ability to read the human aura. I have long since determined that what I was seeing was not somehow a fabrication of an imagined result, but that I was able to accurately see the fields of awareness of thoughts and feelings as well as the physical health state of a person at a glance. I have been able to accurately see illness in the body, pain, as well as see images of the thoughts of people, which for me have shown up as vivid images in the auric field. I have seen mental illness expressed in specific ways, too. What’s more, I have found that built into this sense was the capacity to see the images before the person spoke them, which was itself very telling to me that I was indeed on to something. I have been able to see the auric field of a person move first and then I have seen how the physical body would move into the exact location as the aura field had moved. I saw a professor move his auric arm into a new position while his right hand a few seconds later went into that same position. I have seen this effect many times, and it has all suggested to me that indeed, we think first and then seconds later, follow our thoughts through physical action. It has been this lag that has shown me how it was impossible for me to have simply guessed these movements to have happened in the way that they did.

A part of this inner sensing that the brain interprets into vivid imagery which we call the aura or human energy field, is that we cannot actually see this energy with our eyes. Speaking with a physiological psychologist, I asked if it was possible for the brain to receive and interpret data not coming from the physical senses, in putting it into a sensory portion of the brain, in say, vision. He said without hesitation, “Absolutely.”I would go one further to say that all psychic senses use this same kind of translation, using the brain as a faithful translator of inner sensory information. For those of you who have had experience with clairsentience for example, you can perhaps begin to realize how developed this “translational” ability is in the brain….as if it was designed to do this (which I suspect it is).

A number of years ago while standing outside at nighttime, I was standing by a small maple tree whose tip extended upwards of about 15 feet above me. I noticed that I was able to see energy, auric field type energy, flowing from the tree. I had never seen this before and I was interested in what on earth was going on. I saw these brilliant bits of energy that expressed themselves as vivid sparks of energy, small balls of energy that were traveling up the trunk of the tree and out through its branches. These bits of auric energy continued upward, leaving the tree as they floated upwards like sparks into the sky. As I watched I was aware that what was happening was two-fold: the energy in the tree was balancing itself as it was doing what we think of as dreaming. One of the facets of reading fields is that there is always a deeper understanding of the phenomenon that is being viewed (because it is an inner sense). In the same way that pollen and seeds are dispersed so too does its consciousness energy disperse even though the individual consciousness is never lessened itself.

A few years later, on the advice of a friend, I was harvesting some flowers at night from some plants near my studio in order to make flower essences. At the time, the sky was overcast and it was almost completely dark. I had to walk up to where I knew the flowers were, and as I did so, I noticed something interesting. As I moved along where the flowers were growing, my hands skimming over their tops (I was like Hellen Keller at this point because there was so little light that I had to feel my way around) I noticed that at a certain point the quality of the energy of the flowers changed abruptly. In fact, the change was rather noticeable. It felt like one section of the plants had a more masculine feeling while another section of the same group felt feminine. I moved my hands over them again and got the same result. This was curious, I thought. Was there a difference between what seemed to be the same stand of flowers?

The next day I went out to where these wildflowers were. They were a very small flower, hard to even see even in daylight and as I walked over to them I noticed that I was standing in about the same place as I had the night before. As I looked at them, I noticed that at the point where I felt the plants had changed their energy, expressed at what felt like masculine and then feminine, I saw that the flowers changed color. There were two different varieties present. On one side, they were a pale blue and on the other side, a light yellow. Was I able to see the colors of these flowers? I had no memory of being able to do so in the dark. Was I perhaps picking up on other smaller clues at the edges of my own physical senses in the darkness? I suppose it could be possible. However, with as strong a result as I was getting with my inner senses, I have my doubts that this was all just interpreting something from bits and scraps of sensory data.

A few years ago while watching a TED Talk, I came across a talk by a researcher who described how plants that have the ability to pull in their leaves when brushed against, showed that these plants have the ability t learn. They dropped the plants in their planters from a height over and over, providing time for the plant’s systems to recover so the effect could be repeated. What she found was that after the sixth time this drop was completed, the plants stopped responding to this stimulus. They had learned, she contended, that this stimuli was not a danger to them. I would post this video now for your reference but in searching for it, it did not come up through my searches in preparing this article. Other research has shown that plants communicate and that they may have emotional responses. I can recall reading in East West Journal as a child how in the early 70’s scientists published the results of an experiment where they hooked up a house plant to a lie detector and dropped live shrimp into boiling water from across the room. The electrical activity on the lie detector, that the plant put out during this experiment, was described as a “scream.” The researcher who conducted these tests was named Cleve Backster.

Backster and his collaborators went on to hook up polygraph machines to dozens of plants, including lettuces, onions, oranges, and bananas. He claimed that plants reacted to the thoughts (good or ill) of humans in close proximity and, in the case of humans familiar to them, over a great distance. In one experiment designed to test plant memory, Backster found that a plant that had witnessed the murder (by stomping) of another plant could pick out the killer from a lineup of six suspects, registering a surge of electrical activity when the murderer was brought before it. Backster’s plants also displayed a strong aversion to interspecies violence. Some had a stressful response when an egg was cracked in their presence, or when live shrimp were dropped into boiling water, an experiment that Backster wrote up for the International Journal of Parapsychology, in 1968.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligent-plant

The aboriginal people in the Yucatan Peninsula when asked how they had managed to find plants with the same physical chemistry told Terrence McKenna that the plants themselves told them. When Terrance asked how this was achieved, they took him into a ceremony where a form of DMT was used. Using DMT, they were able to speak to the plants, what they described were the spirits of the plants. Similarly, those who have taken ayahuasca have described experiences where they encounter the spirit of the plant, which helps them in healing psychological problems that they have. Native Americans have described how they have communicated with trees for ages, so this awareness is nothing new. It seems that science is just now beginning to catch up with experiments that are just beginning, for the Western world, to unravel the inner life of plants and how they exhibit evidence of sentience. I think that the mainstream is late to the party.

So what gives? Belief, that’s what. Most of us have been taught that the only real thinking and feeling being on this planet is the human. There has even been the theory (or belief) that other mammals, like cows, don’t feel pain like we do, something that we now clearly know is not the case at all. Even in less “sophisticated” life forms we see reactions to pain and stress that are hard to deny or ignore. I think we do this in order to gloss over the violence that we do to these other life forms by making the assumption that without a nervous system there is no way for a living thing to feel pain or emotion. Saying and believing this makes us feel better, it makes us feel like we are off the hook. As time goes by and more work is done in this field I think we will see a world that is alive with sentience, awareness, and consciousness. Investigation into the world of plants is beginning to show that a central nervous system or brain is necessary for expressing (and our measuring) sentience.

The great thing that all of this suggests to me is that we can access these other consciousnesses with our own consciousness. Consciousness is a kind of “technology” that is perfectly suited for understanding and learning more if you learn how to use it in that way. The only thing that stands in your way is your own bias or belief that it could never possibly be true. In my experiments into remote viewing I was able to see how matter is formed at the subatomic scale. In this amazing experience, I saw how particles, which had no mass, would appear as if on cue within the form of a subatomic particle and then merge with another complimentary particle of opposite charge in order to create the appearance of physicality at the subatomic level. Now this was incredible to see and impossible to believe at first. But when I began doing some research into this experience, I found that there were theoretical physicists who were describing much the same thing. They described how matter is formed through the interaction of “matched pairs” of energetic particles that created the phenomenon of matter. The only thing missing from their theory was the presence of particles that were themselves aware (which was what I saw). When I first experienced this amazing result the first few times that I tried it, the effect was revolutionary. I wanted to run out into the street and ask people, “Have you seen this???” What I found in my research was that there was a whole group of physicists who had found that at the base of matter at the quantum level, was consciousness. If you don’t know what they were on about, then study what is called “The Measurement Problem” and you will be holding the tail of the cosmic tiger. It is no surprise that so many people in consciousness studies often quote material from these physicists who belonged to a branch of research called Quantum Mechanics. What I would say is that initially, those scientists found some amazing things and then…..nothing. It wasn’t carried much further. Some of its members did go on to do work in the field of consciousness studies, but it was a movement that seemed to die on the vine in the sense that there wasn’t a new generation of physicists who sought to then use their own consciousness to probe into what this facet of matter being conscious might actually mean in a larger more expanded understanding. This is most likely because the discoveries of those physicists like Bohm, Plank, and Heisenberg strained the belief systems of people at the time and we all collectively retreated into our familiar beliefs that the world really is just a bunch of atoms that as Alfred North Whitehead once asked,”blindly run.”

What this does for me is it shows or opens up a door of awareness that there is still much to learn and to know about our world. Consciousness, for me, is a tool that we can indeed use for understanding what science is not ready yet to examine. You can learn how to use it to do this probing and exploration. One of the most easy ways to begin doing this is through remote viewing. You can read up on how it is done and then conduct experiments for yourself in a completely blind environment. You might need a friend who can go to a location, perhaps photograph what they see and experience, and then report back once you have written down your impressions. This is how remote viewing works, and while in the beginning it might be useful for you to do experiments like the one I just described, as you see the results of your experiments bear fruit, you can move into areas where it is harder for you to confirm what it is you are viewing (like consciousness of other life forms for example). It is also something that the ancients have been doing for a very long time. In the words of the Sutra of Pentenjali, when one attains to a certain level of awareness in consciousness, a person so endowed can look at the stars and know their composition, can look at a person and know their secrets and their thoughts.This is so because consciousness itself is not limited in the way that we think that it is. That goes for plants and the so-called “lower” animals. And I think that what this examination can do is to begin to show those who are curious and courageous enough how truly amazing this world is.

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