The unseen world of plant intelligence (NPR)

Plant and fungi kingdoms are conscious and communicate? Yes! Once one said to me, "Go outside and sit in the dirt." I was inside a Buddhist meditation next to the garden that I could see through big windows. I didn't understand why it was so insistent. Then I realized that it sits.

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The Light Eaters: How Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers New Understanding of Life on Earth

India's J.C. Bose gets too little credit for founding the scientific study of plant consciousness and intelligence. Fortunately, Paramhansa Yogananda documented Bose's scientific contributions in Chapter 8 of his famous book Autobiography of a Yogi. This eventually led to the publication of the mind-blowing The Secret Life of Plants.

More recently, Michael Pollan took a deep dive with This is Your Mind on Plants. Emma Farrell published Journeys with Plant Spirits about the details and real secrets of plants. Now there is more amazing science and shamanism looking at our plant cousins.

Author Zoë Schlanger releases an amazing book of botanical research tomorrow, May 7, 2024. Plants are aware and intelligent.  They have a secret life! We can hardly wrap our minds around the idea, but science reveals what many from the Buddha to St. Francis of Assisi to female scientists always intuited. This book is a #1 best seller in Ecology from pre-orders. The author appeared on NPR on May 6.

• “A masterpiece of science writing.”
  
  –Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass
• “Mesmerizing, world-expanding, and achingly beautiful.”
  
  –Ed Yong, author of An Immense World
• “Rich, vital, and full of surprises. Read it!”
  
  –Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky and The Sixth Extinction
• “A brilliant must-read. This book shook and changed me.”
  
  –David George Haskell, author of Sounds Wild and Broken, The Songs of Trees, and The Forest Unseen

This forest is enchanted. I'm not alone here.

Award-winning Atlantic staff writer Zoë Schlanger delivers a groundbreaking work of popular science that probes the hidden world of the plant kingdom and reveals the astonishing capabilities of the green life all around us.

It takes tremendous biological creativity to be a plant. To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival.

In recent years, scientists have learned about their ability to communicate, recognize their kin and behave socially, hear sounds, morph their bodies [like a space alien chameleon squid under the sea] to blend into their surroundings, store useful memories that inform their life cycle, and trick animals into behaving to their benefit, to name just a few remarkable talents.

The Light Eaters is a deep immersion into the drama of green life and the complexity of this wild and awe-inspiring world that challenges our very understanding of agency, consciousness, and intelligence.

Journeys with Plant Spirits (Emma Farrell)

Plants/shrooms are alive on another frequency.

In looking closely, we see that plants, rather than imitate human intelligence, have perhaps formed a parallel system.

What is intelligent life if not a vine that grows leaves to blend into the shrub on which it climbs, a flower that shapes its bloom to fit exactly the beak of its pollinator, a pea seedling that can hear water flowing and make its way toward it?

Zoë Schlanger (Heather Sten/Harper Collins)

Zoë Schlanger takes us across the globe, digging into her own memories and into the soil with the scientists who have spent their waking days studying these amazing entities up close.

• AUDIO: Zoë Schlanger makes the case for plant intelligence in 'The Light Eaters' (NPR)
• Waging war on sex workers: The journalist and former sex worker on what feminists get wrong about prostitution – Zoe Schlanger interviews one (guernicamag.com)

What can we learn about life on Earth from the living things that thrive, adapt, consume, and accommodate simultaneously?

More importantly, what do we owe these life forms once we come to understand their rich and varied abilities?

Go vegan: plant "meat"

Examining the latest epiphanies in botanical research, Schlanger spotlights the intellectual struggles among the researchers conceiving a wholly new view of their subject, offering a glimpse of a field in turmoil as plant scientists debate the tenets of ongoing discoveries and how they influence our understanding of what a plant is.

We need plants to survive. But what do they need us for — if at all? An eye-opening and informative look at the ecosystem we live in, this book challenges us to rethink the role of plants — and our own place — in the natural world.

Healing with Medicinal Plants of the West (Chumash Cecilia Garcia, USC Prof. James Adams)

Plants know. Isn't this exactly what we've always been trying to tell the White Man?

• Michael Pollan revolutionized our view of plants and psychedelics
• Zoë Schlanger (NPR), May 6, 2024; text (amazon.com); Dhr. Seven, Kelly Ani, Pat Macpherson (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Botanist Bose on Secret Life of Plants (SRF)

Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi (1946 ed.), Chapter 8; Eds., Wisdom Quarterly

India's Great Scientist, J.C. Bose

Bose, Royal Inst London, 1897

"[Sir] Jagadish Chandra Bose's wireless inventions antedated those of Marconi." Overhearing this provocative remark, I walked closer to a sidewalk group of professors engaged in scientific discussion. If my motive in joining them was racial [nationalistic] pride, I regret it. I cannot deny my keen interest in evidence that India can play a leading part in physics, and not metaphysics alone.

"What do you mean, sir?"

Plants and  metals feel, Bose's instruments show.

The professor obligingly explained. "Bose was the first one to invent a wireless coherer and an instrument for indicating the refraction of electric waves. But the Indian scientist did not exploit his inventions commercially. He soon turned his attention from the inorganic to the organic world. His revolutionary discoveries as a plant physiologist are outpacing even his radical achievements as a physicist." 

• The Secret Life of Plants
• Little-known side effects of smoking cannabis
• AUDIO: Chapter 8 in Autobiography of a Yogi

J.C. Bose bust at Cambridge University

I politely thanked my mentor. He added, "The great scientist is one of my brother professors at Presidency College." 

I paid a visit the next day to the sage at his home, which was close to mine on Gurpar Road. I had long admired him from a respectful distance. The grave and retiring botanist greeted me graciously. He was a handsome, robust man in his fifties, with thick hair, broad forehead, and the abstracted eyes of a dreamer. The precision in his tones revealed the lifelong scientific habit. 

"I have recently returned from an expedition to scientific societies of the West. Their members exhibited intense interest in delicate instruments of my invention which demonstrate the indivisible unity of all life [Footnote 1]. The Bose crescograph has the enormity of ten million magnifications. The microscope enlarges only a few thousand times; yet it brought vital impetus to biological science. The crescograph opens incalculable vistas."

The Secret Life of Plants

"You have done much, sir, to hasten the embrace of East and West in the impersonal arms of science." 

"I was educated at Cambridge. How admirable is the Western method of submitting all theory to scrupulous experimental verification! That empirical procedure has gone hand in hand with the gift for introspection which is my Eastern heritage. Together they have enabled me to sunder the silences of natural realms long uncommunicative. The telltale charts of my crescograph [2] are evidence for the most skeptical that plants have a sensitive nervous system and a varied emotional life. Love, hate, joy, fear, pleasure, pain, excitability, stupor, and countless appropriate responses to stimuli are as universal in plants as in animals." 

"The unique throb of life in all creation could seem only poetic imagery before your advent, Professor! A saint I once knew would never pluck flowers. 'Shall I rob the rosebush of its pride in beauty? Shall I cruelly affront its dignity by my rude divestment?' His sympathetic words are verified literally through your discoveries!" 

"The poet is intimate with truth, while the scientist approaches awkwardly. Come someday to my laboratory and see the unequivocable testimony of the crescograph." 

Gratefully I accepted the invitation and took my departure. I heard later that the botanist had left Presidency College and was planning a research center in Calcutta. 

Botanist Jagadish Chandra Bose

When the Bose Institute (boseinst.ernet.in) was opened, I attended the dedicatory services. Enthusiastic hundreds strolled over the premises. I was charmed with the artistry and spiritual symbolism of the new home of science. Its front gate, I noted, was a centuried relic from a distant shrine. Behind the lotus [3] fountain, a sculptured female figure with a torch conveyed the Indian respect for woman as the immortal light-bearer. The garden held a small temple consecrated to the Noumenon beyond phenomena. Thought of the divine incorporeity was suggested by absence of any altar-image. 

Bose's speech on this great occasion might have issued from the lips of one of the inspired ancient rishis. 

"I dedicate today this [Bose] Institute as not merely a laboratory but a temple." His reverent solemnity stole like an unseen cloak over the crowded auditorium. "In the pursuit of my investigations I was unconsciously led into the border region of physics and physiology. To my amazement, I found boundary lines vanishing, and points of contact emerging, between the realms of the living and the non-living. Inorganic matter was perceived as anything but inert; it was athrill under the action of multitudinous forces. 

Dharma Buddhist Meditation for Yoga

"A universal reaction seemed to bring metal, plant, and animal under a common law. They all exhibited essentially the same phenomena of fatigue and depression, with possibilities of recovery and of exaltation, as well as the permanent irresponsiveness associated with death.

"Filled with awe at this stupendous generalization, it was with great hope that I announced my results before the Royal Society — results demonstrated by [reproducible] experiments.

"But the physiologists present advised me to confine myself to physical investigations, in which my success had been assured, rather than encroach on their preserves." More

• Mary Joyce UFO images 8/13/22 | Coast to Coast

1. "All science is transcendental or else passes away. Botany is now acquiring the right theory -- the avatars of Brahma will presently be the textbooks of natural history." - Emerson from the Latin root crescere, to increase. For his crescograph and other inventions, Bose was knighted in 1917.

2. The lotus flower is an ancient divine symbol in India; its unfolding petals suggest the expansion of the soul; the growth of its pure beauty from the mud of its origin holds a benign spiritual promise.

3. "At present, only the sheerest accident brings India into the purview of the American college student. Eight universities (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Pennsylvania, Chicago, and California) have chairs of Indology or Sanskrit, but India is virtually unrepresented in departments of history, philosophy, fine arts, political science, sociology, or any of the other departments of intellectual experience in which, as we have seen, India has made great contributions....We believe, consequently, that no department of study, particularly in the humanities, in any major university can be fully equipped without a properly trained specialist in the Indic phases of its discipline. We believe, too, that every college which aims to prepare its graduates for intelligent work in the world which is to be theirs to live in, must have on its staff a scholar competent in the civilization of India." - Extracts from an article by Professor W. Norman Brown of the University of Pennsylvania which appeared in the May 1939 issue of the Bulletin of the American Council of Learned Societies, 907 15th St., Washington, D. C., 25ø copy. This issue (#28) contains over 100 pages of a "Basic Bibliography for Indic Studies."

Conscious Life Expo (Feb. 22-25)

Ananda M., Dhr. Seven, Jen B. (Dharma Meditation Initiative); ConsciousLifeExpo.com

It's never too late to live my TV dream!

The Conscious Life Expo is a three-day gathering of individuals and tribes for a three-day celebration of conscious evolution and a brainstorming session on where we are and where we are going. We live in an evolving universe, an orgasmic dance of consciousness. Everything is changing, evolving, transforming. Wise people throughout history have tried to define the nature of the reality, and myriad models have existed for it. But we are creating a new model still being figured out. This conference is for us to participate in the conscious co-creation of a new sustainable world that merges science and spirituality -- a wholistic, powerful, and passionate celebration of life and love.

• Visit with the Dharma Meditation Initiative
• LAX Hilton (next to Los Angeles Airport)
• 5711 W. Century Blvd., Los Angeles, CA
• Friday‎, ‎Feb.‎ ‎22‎, ‎3‎:‎00‎ ‎PM to ‎Monday‎, ‎Feb.‎ ‎25‎, ‎10‎:‎30‎ ‎PM

"Crazy Wisdom" (trailer)

"Crazy Wisdom: The Life and Times of Chogyam Trungpa" directed by Johanna Demetrakas, produced by Lina Leeman

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the "bad boy of Buddhism," shattered notions about how an "enlightened" guru should behave when he abandoned his monk's vows and eloped with a 16 year old British girl. He founded Shambhala Int'l, which some call a cult and others a made up lineage, then bequeathed it to his son. Twenty years after his death, Trungpa's name still evokes outrage and admiration. What made him tick? What is crazy wisdom? And just what is enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism anyway?

• crazywisdomthemovie.com
• Introduction to "Zeitgeist" by Trungpa

Warrior King of Shambhala: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (Jeremy Hayward): A pioneer in introducing Tibetan Buddhism to the West, Chogyam Trungpa is also one of its most controversial figures. Born in Tibet and trained in the traditional manner, he arrived in the U.S. in 1970, a time when there was virtually no knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism in the general culture. He defied notions of how a holy man should act. Dressing in Western clothing and at times exhibiting unconventional behavior, his "crazy wisdom" and his anti- "spiritual materialism" made him a magnet for a generation of counterculture spiritual seekers. This book begins when Hayward meets Trungpa in 1970, then progresses year by year until Trungpa’s death and beyond.

The Buddhist Channel (TV, Web)

Chief: The Life and Work of K Sri Dhammnanda -- Buddhist Channel original film on Malaysia's most famous [Sri Lankan] monk, which premiered at WIFF.
Now Showing: Part 1. download; Part 2. download Part 3. download

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Premasara Epasinghe, Pvt. Sec'y to the Minister of Education

(WQ, Daily News of Sri Lanka)

(Buddhist Channel TV) Television is powerful and popular. It was only introduced to Sri Lanka in 1979. Why is it powerful and popular? It communicates directly and simultaneously to every home. Television captures the entire family at the same time. So its impact is enormous.

Peaceful co-existence through Dharma
Television's audio-visual contents can be used for the betterment or detriment of society. Most TV channels in the world are interested in arousing the five senses.

There are many reports published in the West about social research on TV and violence. It is detrimental to society. Some Sri Lankan TV is not suitable for young minds.

Our TV Channels should give priority to presenting programs of aesthetic value, elevating artistic appreciation, showing what is good for the entire family and society at large. It should be educational.

Propagating Dharma
The Buddhist Channel is comprised of programs on the teachings of the Buddha. These educational programs are based on moral-virtue, calm-concentration, and mindful-wisdom (sila, samadhi, and prajna respectively).

The idea is to teach individually moral, publicly ethical, and timelessly spiritual values. The Channel's thinking and philosophy are to build an exemplary Buddhist society in Sri Lanka. It is also to create an excellent international image for the country. With this good intention in mind, the Buddhist Channel was started as the world’s first and only global Buddhist satellite television broadcasting network.

The Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, inaugurated it a year ago, stating: “One Poson Day more than 2,000 years ago, Arhat Mahinda Thera, son of the Great Indian Emperor Asoka, brought the message of the Buddha and Dharma to our island. Today using modern technology, we can send the Buddha’s message to the entire world.”

As the president stated, it is the "Gift of Dharma" that Sri Lanka is eminently qualified to send out to the world. The Buddha and Dharma illuminate the way. Humankind is thus able to cross from dark, hateful, deluded conflict and suffering into a new world of light filled with loving-kindness, compassion, wisdom, and the peace and happiness that come from that.

This is to be achieved within the next few decades, making the Channel a catalyst for a "new world order" of righteousness.

A pious Hindu, the Tamil gentleman Muhundan Kanage, was the owner of CBN SAT TV Channel (Pvt) Ltd. When his company was acquired by Dialog Television (Pvt) Ltd, he insisted on having a Sri Lankan Buddhist Channel. He made arrangements with the new owners to allocate a Buddhist Channel in their package and donated the TV equipment he owned to Sambodhi Viharaya on Gregory’s Road in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo.

The Origin
Today, it is part of the religious programming of the Dialog Sat TV, which is a DTH service given to its subscribers free of charge like the other religious channels-Christianity, Hinduism and Islam. At the same time, the SLT Vision Com is also transmitting these Buddhist programs. The Buddhist channel is still in its infancy. It has not yet fully established in Sri Lanka.

Sri Lankans can view The Buddhist channel programs on TNL for a couple of hours commencing from 3:00 PM daily....

The mission has already been undertaken by the Ven. Shastrapathi Pandita Daranagama Kusaladhamma Nayaka Thera with the help of a dynamic committee for the Sri Sambodhi Viharaya. Everything is already in motion to make the Buddhist Channel a terrestrial telecasting service.