My friend Debra is a strong believer in the power of thoughts. When she wants something, she fixes the image of it in her mind, feeding the thought daily with expectation and gratitude. So she waits. Invariably, whether it takes her 2 days, 2 months, or 2 years, she gets what she wants. She has repeatedly shown that there is power in thoughts.
What you have fixed on your mind invariably turns up, in one form or another, a mantel clock that is a perfect replica of one you saw in a magazine, a parking spot that miraculously opens in a blizzard, the ideal companion for a lonely and divorced friend, a perfect place for her husband’s new business. Her life is full of the blessings of a pure and tender heart, which she knows how to ask for and expect to be given.
The more I am in contact with her, the less I am surprised by her clear and prophetic way of receiving the gifts of the universe. After all, we have seen a pronounced paradigm shift in the last 25 years, a change in the way we perceive the world and our role within it. We now recognize that there is not only power in our thoughts, but power in the thoughts of the natural realm. As humans, we have arrogantly isolated ourselves from the plant, animal and mineral worlds, thinking that we have been the only privileged species with thought and power.
Not anymore, according to two books — “The Hidden Messages of Water” (2004) by Masaro Emoto and “Primary Perception: Biocommunication with Plants, Living Foods and Human Cell” (2003) by Cleve Backster — both published within the past 3 years, in step with a growing recognition that we are no longer the only intelligent species in the universe. These books introduce us not only to the secret life of water, but also to the secret thoughts of plants.
Masaru Emoto, a renowned Japanese researcher and independent thinker, shocked and inspired the world with his high-speed photographs of the structure of water taken at the moment of freezing. What these photographs showed was that the water responded directly to human thoughts, words, and even music. Crystals formed in frozen water changed their formation and behavior in response to specific thoughts or words directed at them. Water blessed with benevolence and love, for example, showed bright, symmetrical patterns. The water, exposed to negative thoughts and words, assumed asymmetrical, incomplete and dejected forms.
Emoto has come to see that water is not an inanimate substance; he is able to “copy” and “memorize” information. Memory is alive and throbbing throughout the universe; the rock in our garden is not just a rock; it carries layers of cartilage-grooved memories beneath its surface, all the more reason we revere it. Our own memories are carried in our cells; These memories are made up of the words we say and the thoughts we hold in our minds. Says Emoto, “In Japan, the words of the soul are said to reside in a spirit called… the ‘spirit of words,’ and the act of speaking words has the power to change the world.”
If water can respond to human thoughts, so can plants, says Cleve Backster in his book. Considered a leading authority on polygraph and lie detection, Backster attached electrodes from his polygraph machine to the stem of a plant to measure the time required for water to travel up the plant to reach the leaves. In the process of this experiment, he discovered that the plant could respond to human thought; the idea of burning the leaves of the plant registered a wild and erratic movement on the polygraph. This was the beginning of his lifelong interest in understanding the process of cellular communication, what he calls “Primary Perception”, the ability of plant, animal and human cells to perceive and respond both locally and non-locally.
Devising further experiments, he discovered that cellular memory and communication can transcend both space and time and can be measured: the plants reacted by boiling shrimp in water; the yogurt reacted to the death of bacteria even when these experiments were carried out miles apart. In an interview, Backster recounted a botanist’s visit to his lab that elicited a strange response from his plants: the charts showed an errant flat line indicating that the plants were in shock. Prompted by his reaction, he asked his guest if she had done anything to hurt the plants she worked with.” His response was comically online: “Harm them? Honey, I roast them to get their dry weight.” More than 40 years of research has bolstered his observation: that plant, animal, and even bacterial cells are sentient organisms that responded to thought or intention, engaged in a primal perception that we, by the modern human world, they seem to have forgotten.
In summary, let me quote not mystics or Sufi poets, but one of the leading scientists and thinkers of our time: the physicist David Bohm, whose book “Totality and the Implicate Order” (1980) is a major catalyst for our change of paradigm. . Bohm speaks of two orders in the universe: the explained or unfolded order of ordinary perception and the implied or involved order of extraordinary perception. This is what it says: In the implicate order, “space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relations of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different kind of basic connection of elements to elements is possible.” from which our ordinary notions of space and time, together with those of separately existing material particles, are abstracted as derivative forms of the deeper order.”
We’ve had it skewered the whole time. We think that what we see with our physical eyes is the whole truth. But this ordinary perception of space and time is only a derivative of the primary and extraordinary perception that we have lost: the power of thought, but that we can recover with a change in our thinking and attitudes, as my friend Debra has done.
Copyright 2006 Maria Desaulniers