Psychic Intention And The “Backster Effect”
If you’ve never heard of Cleve Backster, prepare yourself to be shocked. Backster was famous for his work on the galvanometer, the lie detector machine used by law enforcement, military intelligence and agencies like the CIA. In fact, Backster did work for the CIA. But that’s not the shocking bit. It is his second career that earned him both cheers and jeers and laid the foundation for a substantial portion of a best selling book, The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. Backster pioneered the use of the galvanometer in research on the sensitivity of plants (and eventually other life forms) to threats in their environment. I decided to concentrate on his work for the purpose of illustrating how and why Intention is such a powerful tool of consciousness because his work has been widely publicized and carefully studied. It has also been dissed and subjected to ham-fisted research that claimed but in fact did NOT repeat his experiments faithfully. This is a common problem in the age of “grant’” based “research” in which original experimental protocols are either ignored altogether or ‘varied’ in such a way to as to cast doubt on the original experimenter’s work. All too often such non-scientific approaches are employed for the sake of merely getting “published” rather than advancing the cause of science. (There has been an alarming increase in the number of cases of retracted scientific reports since 2001, most of them because of either deliberate falsification of experimental results or flawed protocols in the design of the experiments, and non-evidence based attacks on rival scientists’ results.)
Psychic Intention And The Backster Effect
In Mr. Backster’s case, despite increasingly rigorous precautions in his testing
methods, “mainstream” scientists continue to insist that his results are “impossible” because the notion that plants can detect human intent is “impossible”. If that makes you dizzy, it’s because the critics’ reasoning goes round and round like a carousel, always arriving at the same destination as the starting point. Not very scientific at all. The important point about Backster’s work is that it was based on measurable changes of frequency emitted by plants not only when they were deliberately damaged (cutting or picking leaves) but even when the experimenter, segregated in a separate room 10 metres away, merely thought about applying a lit match to a leaf! The galvanometer recorded a spike at that instant. Not only did plants respond to threats to their well-being, they reacted just as strongly to damage to other forms such as brine shrimp being placed in boiling water!
Psychic Intention and Plant Consciousness
What does this mean? Do plants have emotions? Or do destructive thoughts send out some sort of signal that causes all living things to recoil as a defence? Is this the botanical equivalent of the human fight or flight response? All living things, including humans, radiate energy. Plants seem to be receiving “messages” from the energy humans radiate but they also react in anticipation of threat, about 1/2 to 1 second ahead of the intention to hurt being broadcast by an experimenter.
WE Are Made Of Light
One possible explanation of how this works was advanced by scientist Dr. Fritz Albert
Popp the scientist who demonstrated that thought travels as photons: “We know today that man, essentially, is a being of light. And the modern science of photobiology…is presently proving this. In terms of healing, the implications are immense. We now know, for example, that quanta of light can initiate, or arrest, cascade-like reactions in the cells, and that genetic cellular damage can be virtually repaired, within hours, by faint beams of light. We are still on the threshold of fully understanding the complex relationship between light and life, but we can now say emphatically, that the function of our entire metabolism is dependent on light.”
We now know that, from a physiological perspective, thought can be observed in action, photon by photon. We know that the energy of thought travels in waves as light and that all living things radiate this light which can be captured on photographic plates. Because of the discoveries of quantum physicists we know that the everything that exists is part of the Zero Point Field, the invisible background that is in constant motion as sub-atomic particles radiate energy and exchange information continually. We know that positive intention has a beneficial effect on plants, bacteria, fungi, amoebas, yeasts, etc. and that negative or harmful intention causes to plants to register a spike in their energy output.
Proof That Intention Works
We know that there have been cases of people suffering from illness “receiving” healing energy from both local and distant healers who concentrate on directing healing energy to the patient. Measurements in blood pressure, metabolic rate, breathing, and galvanic skin response taken of both healers and patients reflect the exact instant when the intention was ‘sent’ and ‘received’ before reverting to a neutral state and then ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ again. Such distinguished scientists as Dr. Karl Pribram, Dr. Fritz Albert Popp, Dr. Dean Radin, and Dr. Anton Zeilinger and researchers like Dr. Gary Schwartz to name only a few, have tested this process over and over again and have confirmed the reality of the effects although a full explanation of how it works is still in progress. And this is where ordinary people come into the picture.
Beam My Thoughts Up, Scotty
The one thing we all have in common is Consciousness as I have written in these
pages before. That some of us are more conscious than others has also been demonstrated by studies of long-term meditators whose practice results in a significant change in their brain-wave patterns and a resultant coherence in all four lobes of the brain during meditation. Like any other human skill, practice improves performance in meditation, but there are also ‘prodigies’, people who seem to be able to rapidly slip into a coherent state in which they emit healing energies or pick up information (psychic sensing). Most healers and psychics, however, developed their abilities beyond whatever their starting point was. The significance of this process is that if you are conscious, you can refine your ability to send and receive information by using the power of thought combined with a well defined intention. Think of it as ‘laser thought’. Just as coherent light is more effective than scattered light, coherent brain waves are more effective in terms of accomplishing subtle changes at the cellular level whether human/animal or plant-based.
Leaving Matter Behind
Does this mean that we can all become millionaires by meditating? No. It means that we – as a species – are at the beginning of a new era of human development, one in which our subtle powers can move us beyond the limitations of third dimensional physical reality. It means that it may be possible to move beyond our dependence on machines to accomplish feats we have insufficient strength to do unaided at present. It means that it may be possible to change the status quo at the sub-atomic level through collective intention. It means that life could be far more efficient than it is now. The skillful use of Intention could eliminate much of the wasteful conflict that keeps humans in a perpetual state of bondage to materiality: the drive for power, territory, hegemony, etc. After all, matter accounts for less that 4% of the universe of which 73% is dark matter and 23% is dark energy and we have no clear idea of what that ‘dark reality’ IS. Yet we expend precious time and energy squabbling over a minute portion of the 4%! If we are to escape the limitations of living in a heavy gravity world to explore even a fraction of the universe, we’ll have to travel light. Real light. We’ll have to get down to our own sub-atomic existence and ride Einstein’s light beam into other dimensions. The old Chinese maxim that ‘every journey begins with the first step’ may need to be modified. Every journey actually begins with the first focused, coherent Intention to make the journey.
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Photo credit: Dr. Fritz Albert Popp, Wikipedia/Wikimedia Creative Commons.
