Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Welcome to lessons from the helpful dead, where you will learn the world is not what it seems, and you are much more than you think you are. Here you learn about positive and reassuring messages from a supposedly dead people whose main purpose is to help us find out what happens after we die, why we're here, how we got here, where we're going, and discover that you are really a powerful eternal spirit. I'm Dan McEnany. Today I'll introduce you to Marcel Vogel, one of the people who was featured in the book the secret Life of Plants. He lived from 1917 to 1991, and he was in his prime pretty much in the fifties, sixties and seventies. He was a research chemist, and he had his own company in San Francisco called Vogel Luminescence. He was a leader, the leader in that field, and he made significant contributions to the founding of color in television screens and a number of other innovative products. By the mid fifties, he became bored with running his own company, and so he sold the company to IBM, and he started working for them, where he could devote full time into research because he was a brilliant fellow. And there at IBM, he would delve into magnetics, optic electrical devices, liquid crystal systems, and he developed inventions that were very crucial in the creation of the storage of information in computers.
[00:01:47] He was so creative that IBM asked him to give a course in creativity.
[00:01:54] One of the students in his class gave him a copy of an article in Argosy magazine that talked about Cleve Baxter's work, which was titled do plants have emotions?
[00:02:07] His first reaction was to throw the article in the wastebasket, which he did. But then, as he started to think about it, he decided there just might be something to it. So he retrieved the article. He then read that article to his students, and he was met with everything from derision to curiosity. He then decided to challenge the students, put them into three groups, and challenge them to repeat some of Baxter's accomplishments. None of them had any success. But when he tried some of the same experiments, he did have some success, and he wondered why he would have the success when others would not. He reasoned that it must have something to do with psychic energy, which was a term popularized by Carl Jung, who had maintained that it was different from physical energy.
[00:03:02] Now, Vogel, being as smart as he was, he figured, well, if there is such a thing as this psychic energy, it must, like other forms of energy, be storable. But in what? And he started staring at the many chemicals on the shelves in his IBM lab. He then asked a spiritually gifted friend, Vivian Wiley, to look at these chemicals and tell him if any of them possibly offered a solution. Well, in her judgment, none of them did. And so she suggested that Vogel just ignore the idea of this being stored in chemicals and just to rely on anything that came to her. And back in her garden, she picked two leaves off a plant, and for one leaf, she gave constant love every day, telling how wonderful it was, etcetera. And she paid no attention to the other leaf. So after a month, she invited Vogel to come over to her house, and he was amazed, because the leaf that had been paid no attention to was flaccid and turning brown. It was beginning to decay. But the leaf that she had focused all this loving thought upon, it was as though it had been freshly plucked from the garden.
[00:04:24] Being the good scientist that he was, he decided to see if he could repeat those results. And sure enough, he did. He plucked three leaves from a plant, paid attention to two of them and the one in the middle. He did not, and got the same results that Vivian Wiley had gotten. He became convinced that he was witnessing the power of psychic energy in action, and he wondered what effect it might have on liquid crystals, an area in which he was an expert. Now, Vogel had many years earlier, studied to be a franciscan priest, and he was able, when he was looking at slides through a microscope, to relax his mind so that he was actually able to sense activity that was not visually revealed in the microscopic field. And said he was led by some higher sensory awareness to adjust the lighting conditions so that these phenomena could be optically recorded to, to the human eye or a camera. Now, here's a very significant point.
[00:05:33] The conclusion that he came to was that crystals are brought into a solid or physical state of existence by what he called preforms, or ghost images of pure energy which anticipate the solids.
[00:05:49] Compare that now to what the entity Seth said about consciousness units and electromagnetic energy units.
[00:05:58] These are, Seth explained, the building blocks of physical matter. And in past sessions, we've gone into the rather complicated explanation of how the electronic energy, the electromagnetic energy units, and the consciousness units do in fact, kind of anticipate and eventually turn into matter. So Vogel was finding out on his own and concluding on his own some of what Seth had explained to us. Now, jumping ahead. By 1971, Vogel abandoned the research on plants. But then doctor Gina Sermanara wrote an article about his research. She had written a popular book on Edgar Cayce. So when people read the article by doctor Sermonera, he started getting a lot of calls for information about what he'd done with plants. Now, being a scientist Vogel realized before he could observe with any precision at all what effects that human thought and emotion might have on plants, he'd have to improve his techniques and eliminate all outside interference. So he did a number of technical things that did indeed eliminate the outside interference. Then, as he began to experiment again, he found out that some of the philodendrons that he was working with had their own personality.
[00:07:30] Even individual leaves seemed to have their own unique individuality.
[00:07:36] Leaves with a large electrical resistance were especially difficult to work with.
[00:07:41] Those with high water content were the best. And the plants appeared to go through phases of activity and inactivity, full of response at certain times, and then sluggish or morose at other times. In one of his subsequent experiments, he attached a galvanometer to a philodendron, and he had some other technical things going on, too, to detect any reaction from the plant. So he stood before the plant, he completely relaxed, so almost touching it with his outspread hands, and he began to shower the plant with affection, same kind of affectionate emotion he would flow to a dear friend. And every time he did this, there were a series of ascending oscillations described on the chart with the pen, with the galvanometer there. And there seemed to be an outpouring from the plant of some sort of energy. So after about five minutes, further release of emotion on Vogel's part evoked no further action from the plant. It seemed to have kind of discharged all of its energy in response to his ministration's well wishing. So, to Vogel, he figured well, the interaction between himself and the philodendron appeared to be in the same order as that. When lovers or close friends meet the intensity, the mutual response at first evokes a surge of energy, until finally it's expended and must be recharged. And he said, like lovers, both he and the plant appeared to remain suffused with joy and contentment as a result of the interaction. He then had many more experiments like this, and then found that he could get the same reaction even if he was some distance from the plant. In another somewhat surprising experiment, he wired two plants to the same recording machine, and he snipped a leaf from the first plant.
[00:09:39] And the second plant responded to the hurt being afflicted, inflicted on the neighbor, but only when Vogel was paying attention to it. If he cut off a leaf while ignoring the second plant, there was no response.
[00:09:52] It's as if Vogel and the plant were lovers on the park vent, oblivious, oblivious to passersby, until, of course, the attention of one lover became distracted from the other.
[00:10:04] Vogel already knew that Zen masters and yoga masters often were unaware of disturbing influences around them when they were in a meditative state.
[00:10:15] And what came clear to him that if he focused with his mind, he had a focused state of consciousness with a good degree of intensity.
[00:10:28] That focused state became an integral and balancing part of the circuitry that was required for him to monitor his plants. And here I need to remind you that one of the early points we made when talking about the Seth entities, he said that we're all focus mechanisms, and if we want to bring something into the material world, we have to focus on it with intensity.
[00:10:57] Now, Seth explained all the technical aspects behind that that I won't repeat here. But what Seth was talking about is the same thing that Vogel was talking about as he experimented. In fact, Vogel said he seemed to be focusing with a seemingly extra conscious part of his mind on the exact notion that a plant would be happy and feel loved and blessed with healthy growth. And that way, the plant and the man became kind of united in the process. Now, those experiments made him feel confident enough to accept an invitation to demonstrate them on television. In that demonstration, the plant was coupled to a pen recorder, and it gave a live illustration of the varying states of Vogel's mind, which could be either a harmonious thought or maybe he got annoyed at the questions of the interviewer, and it would show all of these different emotions on the chart with the pen.
[00:12:04] Then, in subsequent lectures, he pointed out that man can and does communicate with plant life.
[00:12:11] He also maintained that plants are living objects, sensitive, rooted in space. He said, they may be blind, deaf and dumb in the human sense, but there's no doubt in his mind they were an extremely sensitive instrument for measuring man's emotions.
[00:12:27] He maintained they radiate energy forces that are beneficial to man. One can feel these forces, he said, they feed into one's own force field, which in turn feeds back energy to the plant.
[00:12:39] He noted that American Indians were keenly aware of these faculties, and they would often go into the woods and with their arms extended, they would place their backs to a pine tree in order to replenish their energy.
[00:12:54] Now, naturally, when he made these statements, there were a lot of skeptics. But surprisingly, by paying attention to the negative attitudes that would come from an audience, Vogel found he could isolate those individuals emitting the negative emotions and counter their effect with a deep breath, which he had learned in yoga. He would then switch his mind to another mental image, just as if he were turning a dial to a different setting. On a radio, he made an important observation here. He said, the feeling of hostility or negativity in an audience is one of the main barriers to effective communication.
[00:13:32] To counteract this force is one of the most difficult tasks in public demonstration of the plant experiments. If you can't do this, he said, the plant and therefore the equipment will go dead and there's no response until a positive tie can be reestablished.
[00:13:49] It seems, he said, that I act. He was talking about himself. I act as a filtering system, which limits the response of a plant to the outside environment. I can turn it off or on so that people and plant become mutually responsive. By charging the plant with some energy that's in me, I can cause the plant to build up a sensitivity. For this kind of work, it's extremely important that one understand. The plant's response, in his opinion, was not that of an intelligence in the plant form, but that the plant becomes an extension of himself.
[00:14:25] Said he could then interact with the bioelectric field of the plant, or through it with the thought processes and emotions in a third person. His important conclusion about all of this was that there's a life force, a kind of a cosmic energy surrounding all living things that's shareable among plants, animals, and humans.
[00:14:49] Through such sharing, a person and a plant become one, he said.
[00:14:54] This oneness is what makes possible a mutual sensitivity, allowing plant and man not only to intercommunicate, but to record these communications via the plant on a recording chart. So once again, in a very recent episode, the entity Seth pointed out that our scientists, the more they experiment the way they are doing, the further they're getting away from true reality. You might recall, Sen emphasized the need for scientists to unite with whatever they're studying, not be separate from it and kill it and dissect it and cut it into parts. You actually have to unite with it as though its consciousness and yours were one. So Vogel, through his experiments, was really repeating and confirming what Seth had explained in his teachings. And of course, you might remember, Seth had often explained that there is a connection between everything in our universe. And a number of psychics have actually felt this connection. I'm going to stop here for today and continue with a Vogel in our next session. Once again, I'm Dan McEnany, bringing you lessons from the helpful dead, and in this case, from the helpful living, or they were at the time.
