The Secret Teachings of Plants

November 8, 2004
Citing Goethe, Thoreau and other opponents of overweening rationalism, Buhner (Sacred Plant Medicine
), a researcher for the Foundation for Gaian Studies, criticizes the Western "verbal/intellectual/analytical" "mode of cognition" that has suppressed the "holistic/intuitive/depth" cognition of "ancient and indigenous peoples." The antidote to our "linear" scientific mindset, he contends, is the cultivation of direct sensory perceptions through rapt observation of, and psychic communion with, plants until "the student and the plant interweave... their two life fields entrained." Such emotional and spiritual connections to nature are feasible because, according to Buhner's discordantly scientistic theory of all-penetrating cardiac electromagnetic fields, the heart is our main organ of perception and communication. These methods also apply to the "depth diagnosis" of human ailments through direct perception of patients ("Her chest caught my attention, standing forth of its own accord. Beckoning," he writes of a woman with asthma), which he uses in his healing practice. Buhner's romantic-transcendentalist critique of intellect often lapses into anti-intellectualism ("Keep your botany out of this!... Do not use big, scientific words!") and is undermined by his own murky resort to big, scientific words like "molecular self-organization" and "stochastic resonance." He does produce some evocative passages about real plants, but these are often buried under the loam of a New Age mysticism that only the already convinced will appreciate.