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'll learn about positive and reassuring messages from 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.
[00:00:35] As mentioned in the last episode, I got some feedback from some very smart people that my material was getting to be a little bit deep and somewhat conceptual.
[00:00:49] So what I decided to do was give some examples from practical everyday life as to why and how some of these principles that I have discussed work. I decided the best way to do that was to go back to the 1972 bestseller the Secret Life of Plants. And what I'm going to do is to read various excerpts from it, which applied to the material we've been covering since these sessions started. And I'll start by talking about Cleve Baxter. Now, in the 1960s, Cleve Baxter was America's foremost lie detector examiner, and his lie detector equipment worked by detecting emotional changes when someone answered different questions. Now, in 1966, he'd been up all night in his school for polygraph examiners in New York City, where he taught the art of lie detection to policemen and security agents from all around the world. On a sudden impulse, he decided to attach the electrodes from his equipment to the leaf of a plant in his office to see if it would register any emotion. So his first experiment was simply to pour water on the plant. And much to his surprise, the equipment showed an emotional stimulus, stimulus of short duration that would be similar to a human being, experience some kind of emotion. Well, that set him to wondering, could the plant be displaying emotion? Now, with all of his experience, he knew that the most effective way to get a strong emotion would be to threaten the subject. In this case, the subject was the plant. So he dunked the leaf into a cup of hot coffee, but there was no response. So he thought about a worse threat, which would be to burn the leaf of the plant to which the electrodes of his machine were attached. But the instant that he got the picture of the flame in his mind and before he could even move to get a match, there was a dramatic change in the tracing pattern on the graph. It showed a prolonged upward sweep. Now, Baxter hadn't moved either toward the plant or toward the machine. So he wondered, could the plant possibly have been reading his mind? Now, when he left the room to get some matches he found there was another sudden surge on the chart, and he figured, okay, that might be caused by my determination to carry out the threat.
[00:03:42] He then set about burning the leaf. But when he actually burned it, there was less of a reaction than when he first had the intention. Now, next, he went through the process of pretending that he was going to burn the leaf, but he had no intention of doing so.
[00:04:02] And for that, there was no reaction whatever on the equipment. So the logical conclusion to Baxter was, well, the plant must be able to differentiate between real and pretended intent. Well, his emotional reaction at that time was to get excited, and he wanted to run out in the street and yell, plants can think. But instead, he started some meticulous scientific investigation. Then over the ensuing months, he and others conducted experiments on a variety of plants and found the results were consistent with what he had initially experienced. He concluded that since the plants don't have the five physical senses that we humans have, our five physical senses might be limiting factors. After all, the average human can't read someone's mind and determine whether they really mean something or not. Now, right here, I'll mention. It's interesting that he came to this conclusion on his own, based on some scientific experiments. And yet what he concluded agrees with the points made by Seth in the previous session, that the more science and technology advances with us and our five senses and our technological equipment, perhaps the further we're getting away from true reality.
[00:05:25] Subsequent experiments showed even more remarkable capabilities of the plants. Even if the leaf was detached from the plant, there was still a reaction. Even if the leaf was shredded, there was still a reaction on the chart. And he also found that the plants were reacting to unformulated threats, like the sudden appearance of a dog or the entrance into the office of a person who did not wish them well. He even demonstrated to a group at Yale that plants reacted to the emotions of a spider that was being chased around a room, so that just before the spider was going to scamper away from a human hand, attempting to restrict it, there would be this strong reaction on the graph. He also found that plants tended to pass out or go into a deep faint whenever imminent danger was sensed. A physiologist from Canada came to visit his lab, and the plants just gave no reaction whatsoever. Under normal circumstances, they would. So he asked the visitor from Canada, he said, does any part of your work involve harming plants? And the fellow said, yes, I terminate the plants that I work with. I put them in an oven and roast them to obtain their dry weight for my analysis. Well, that was obviously the answer. And about 45 minutes after this fellow left, he was safely on his way to the airport. All of the plants, once again, responded fluidly and as usual on the graph.
[00:07:03] Now, at this point, I want to emphasize here. That I'm not criticizing science and technology.
[00:07:09] After all, the science that we have has brought us a long way. And brought many, many benefits to many people.
[00:07:16] As noted in the past, it does involve separating ourselves from the object to be studied. And the entity. Seth has pointed out that while it has brought us benefits, it's taken us just about as far as we can go with our current understanding. And we needed some new understandings. To explain some of the things that science was discovering. So right here was an example of a scientific person. Separating himself from the thing to be studied. And burning it and so forth. And while he might learn a lot of things from that. And some of those things might be helpful. He would never learn or experience. What Cleve Baxter was learning and experiencing by uniting with the plants. So Baxter, on his own, concluded things that agreed with what Seth taught. It's also interesting to note that Baxter concluded. That perhaps a vegetable appreciates becoming part of another form of life. Rather than just rotting on the ground.
[00:08:24] Just as a human, he thought at death, may experience relief to find himself in a higher realm of being. So here was Baxter based on the results of the scientific experiments. That he couldn't deny. Coming to the same kinds of conclusions. That the dead people, so called dead people in my earlier episodes. All agreed on about death simply being an expansion of awareness. In some other interesting experiments, Baxter also demonstrated. That the plants could determine which person out of a group was lying.
[00:09:06] When all were telling the truth except one.
[00:09:09] He had one student out of six. Stomp on the plant, destroy it. And that was in another location. When they came back into the room where the equipment was. The plants responded emotionally only to the person who had destroyed the plant. They did not respond to the other students. Baxter also conducted experiments. Where he was hundreds of miles away from the plants. And they could still detect emotions.
[00:09:45] When Baxter experienced those emotions, for instance, either taking off or landing on a plane flight. And they had these reactions instantly at the moment when he was experiencing those emotional things.
[00:10:01] So he began wondering. He said, well, maybe an emotional signal. A biologically based emotional signal from an earthbound human. Could reach Mars faster than an electromagnetic wave or a radio wave. Once again, it's interesting to note here. That the conclusions that he arrived at himself. And the theories that he developed. Were similar to those which we've mentioned in past episodes of the quantum physicists back in the fifties. And one of the things that they had theorized was that subatomic particles must be intelligent. And they theorized that because they knew that these subatomic particles seemed to know instantaneously what decisions are made elsewhere, even as far away as another galaxy, and they instantly act on that information.
[00:10:56] So, again, if you're analyzing information and acting on it, they could very well be living particles evaluating and acting on that information just the way the humans do. Baxter went even further. He decided to test the theories that said there was cellular consciousness.
[00:11:20] He found a way to attach the electrodes on his equipment to single cells, like an amoeba yeast, a mold culture, scrapings from the human mouth, blood, and even sperm. And all these were subject to being monitored by the polygraphs.
[00:11:38] He found that sperm cells in particular, they had a particular awareness because they were capable of identifying and reacting to the presence of their own donor, ignoring the presence of other men. So these observations seem to imply to Baxter kind of a total memory, right down to the cell and beyond.
[00:12:02] So what he felt was, he said, sentience doesn't seem to stop at the cellular level. It could go down to the molecular, the atomic, and even the subatomic, just the way that Seth has explained. Remember the consciousness units and the electromagnetic energy units that are kind of incipient matter?
[00:12:25] Baxter figured this out on his own.
[00:12:28] Now, in another interesting experiment, which was the killing of brine shrimp in boiling water. Precautions were taken that there was no human involvement, and the plants were in separate rooms from where the deaths of the shrimp were occurring, and yet they all reacted the same to the deaths of the individual shrimp. Baxter even learned that the plants would react if he cracked an egg that didn't have any little embryo attached to it, just an ordinary egg. They somehow reacted emotionally to the cracking of the egg. So here we have a lot of scientifically proven experiments that tend to support the notion that plants have sensory capabilities that we humans do not have. The implication is that we need to go beyond our present understanding of science, and perhaps by following Seth's advice, that we begin to experiment, uniting with the subject being studied, rather than separating from it and killing it. We might learn many things about consciousness, our own and the consciousness of other species of which we're currently unaware. Well, that concludes today's episode, and in the next episode, we'll take a look at some of the things that a fellow named Marcel Vogel found out. Once again, I'm Dan McEneni, bringing you lessons from the helpful dead.
