Transcript: STEPHEN HARROD BUHNER on Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm, Part Two /14
Ayana Young Hello, my name is Ayana Young and I welcome you to Unlearn and Rewild where we explore radical ideas relating to Earth renewal. Today, we will be presenting part two of last week's interview with Steven Harrod Buehner.
Stephen Harrod Buhner is the Senior Researcher for the foundation for Gaian Studies. Described as both an earth poet and a Bardic naturalist, he is the award winning author of 19 books, including The Lost Language of Plants, The Secret Teachings of Plants, and Sacred Plant Medicine. His most recent book is Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm. Before retiring from the road in 2013, he taught for more than 30 years throughout North America and Europe. He lives in Silver City, New Mexico.
I'd like to touch on a significant co-evolutionary relationship between humans and psychedelic or neurognostic plants, such as cannabis or ayahuasca in the Amazon or iboga in Central Africa, to name a few – oh and the mushrooms which are everywhere but Antarctica. You know, they lured us in with their power and in exchange, we spread their seeds and spores. But if you could speculate, what effect did this union have on the course of human evolution?
Stephen Harrod Buhner Well, there's an interesting thing…It's important to understand that just looking at psilocybin in a very general sense, it predated the emergence of our species by at least 100 million years. Okay, so it must have been doing something all of that time besides pining away for our emergence, right? So the big question is "What does it do? Why is it there?" and I go into that in a lot of detail in Plant Intelligence on the Imaginal Realm.
The thing is, when you get away from brain shamanism, like, you know, people continually are into this stupid thing that human beings are the most intelligent species on the planet and my initial response all the time now is like, “How many people have you met? Don't you read the news? If we're the most intelligent species on the planet, we're totally screwed! Everything is screwed, right? Come on!!” But if you get away from brain shamanism and you look at what's crucial – that foundational important thing – you look at neural networks. Okay, so our brain is the organ that holds our neural network, right? But if you pull our neural network out of the brain organ and look at it, it looks exactly like a lot of other things, including the root systems of plants. And it turns out that in plants, the root system is their neural network. It is their brain and it's highly, highly intelligent. And, you know, it’s like a lot of reductive Neo-Darwinians get upset about that. And then I go, "Well do you know who first came up with the idea of the plant brain? It was Darwin! Don't you ever read his books?"
So the thing is – the root brain, it has neurons exactly like those in our brain. It uses the same neural chemicals that our brain does. It stores memory. You go on and on and on. The intelligence in plants is phenomenal. The thing is, our neural network is limited by the size of our skull, but in plants the root system can grow forever. There's some Aspen root systems that cover hundreds of acres and are over 100,000 years old. Their neural network dwarfs ours by orders of magnitude and their intelligence level is far superior than our own. They engage in tool making. They make chemicals to deal with specific life challenges. Bacteria have a neural network that even exceeds that of plants. They engage in toolmaking. They have language. They have culture – all of the things that are supposedly just unique to us, right.
So the thing is, when you start looking at psychotropics, neurognostics, what they do is they alter neural net function. And it doesn't matter what species of life form, what kind of life form you're dealing with. It affects their neural network architecture and functioning. It shifts their perfect perceptual frame. It allows that organism to more deeply access the metaphysical background of the world to more easily perceive the meanings that are flowing through the world that are affecting its life.
Now, Gregory Bateson said....Another great thing he said that, "All of the life forms that we see are merely transforms of messages.” That's a really fascinating understanding – that there's meanings that are flowing through an ecosystem, let's say, and you have a plant that’s growing in that ecosystem and let's say it's a clover plant. It's going to take on a certain shape, leaf shape behaviors, growth patterns, all of that, because of the meanings that are flowing through that system. The meanings determine the shape. If you take that same plant, transplant it to Russia, let's say to another ecosystem, it will grow very differently because the meanings that are flowing into that system are different there. So what happens for a plant – it doesn't matter what kind of organism but for a plant, let's say – that consumes psilocybin, it gets high exactly the same way we do it. The neural net architecture begins to shift, it begins to perceive meanings more deeply and it begins to innovate on what it perceives. It creates behavioral sophistications and innovations outside of its situated patterning. That's what happens with every life form that takes those. That's the function of neurognostics and psychotropics and psychedelics, they function to modulate the neural network of the planet – the neural networks of the planet because it enhances survivability. It enhances the ability to respond to adverse events and to innovate, the most amazing thing.
So when you started looking at human beings in the West. You know, all cultures, pre-industrial cultures, nonindustrial cultures, use neurognostics. In the West, it was, like, totally kind of hidden and then after all of the drug laws came into play around 1905, they were totally suppressed in the West. And then what's fascinating is in terms of geologic time. Between 1955 and 1965 all of a sudden, the entire Western world was inundated with neurognostics and the culture begins to take these things en masse. And it begins to shift the neural network architecture of the human species in the Western world and they begin to be aware, again, of the metaphysical background of the world – the meanings that flow and and all around them and a whole lot of the people that took those that began to de-pattern – their habituated behaviors and beliefs shifted considerably. And the degree of innovation that came then is absolutely phenomenal.
Hundreds and hundreds of really unique businesses were created. You know, like Apple computers, and PCR testing of bacteria, and all kinds of amazing things are created. The musical innovation was also incredible, and it shifted everything and it pulled us back into a deeper relationship with the world that let a lot of us know that there's life after birth. And this whole other way of being began to come into the system, which really frightened a lot of the more conservative structures in the United States, but nevertheless, it's sort of now with the legalization of marijuana that's beginning to happen. The culture is beginning to accept the necessity for this stuff because those things exist for a reason. They enhance adaptability and survivability and in a very deep level, the people in this culture are driven to do those things for those that come out of evolutionary necessity not hedonistic, foolishness as our Puritan ancestors would have us believe.
Ayana Young You wrote in Plant Intelligence, quote, “Real art connects artists and their art, and those who experience their art with the metaphysical background of the world to the imaginal world that lies deep within the physical. That is, in part, its ecological function,” unquote. I think to ask “What's the ecological function of art?” would probably elicit a lot of blank stares. You know, a very utilitarian perspective is that art arose as a social mechanism to deliver stories and myths, which would create social adhesion as tribes grew larger. I think art expresses the dreaming that is central to all beings and art arose as the human mind became able to transcribe those dream symbols. And, the human hand became dexterous enough to cooperate, but I would venture that all species have the impulse to express in some way or another, and some, like birds, are extremely advanced artists. So what do you think about that? And how does art connect with what we were just speaking about with the psychedelics and neurognostics.
Stephen Harrod Buhner Well, one of the things that I've learned…I’ve been focused on this work that we're talking about for 45 years since I was 17 and one of the things that gradually became clear to me over the years and the decades is that there is no capacity that the human being possesses that is not a general condition of the system from which we've emerged. That everything has the same capacities that we do, they just express them differently whether it's the capacity for toolmaking or language or the capacity to dream or the capacity really for storytelling. You know, that's not a kind of concept. We're getting into a place where the conflict between the real world which I'm describing in the abbreviated form now, the conflict between what's really going on here, and what we've been taught is going on here becomes extreme. As soon as I say something like that people begin to get really twitchy about it because even people that are fairly expansive and their orientations still see the human being as sort of the center of the universe, they don't realize that we don't really matter that much and that we're just a reflection of something else that's much more established. Our ability to sing comes because singing…The capacity for music is inherent in this place, right?
So art is an amazing thing. It's when somebody is able to capture something that can't be captured in words. If they're able to capture it in the structure of a poem, so that you're reading the poem and, all of a sudden, it causes you to make this astonishing leap into this experiential perception of the world that's nowhere in the words, right? But that somehow the words were so imbued with meaning that you gathered momentum as you read it and then you take this amazing leap and then you land in some other kind of frame of reference, that's a crucial element of art. You know, so if I say something like one of my poems…Like uh, “There's one place in all the universe that's been made especially for you and it's inside your own feet.” When you hear that, what people do is they…A lot of people go, “Well, I don't really have a home. I've never felt at home. I don't know where I belong.” And you start saying, “Well, there's one place in all the universe made especially for you.” And at that point, the person begins to create images. Well, if they see a log cabin in a forest, or whatever they see, and then I go, “It's inside your own feet,” there is this shift that takes you into your body in this certain kind of way that for some people, they've never had that experience before because they've been taught to not inhabit their own body. So you get this sort of experiential shift, but you can't really get there through the words themselves. It's an astonishing thing.
Art allows us to shift. When a great painter paints a painting, they're actually painting it like a window. They're painting what they really see. And when we are able to really see, allow ourselves to allow the picture to become a window on the world, we for a moment capture that sight we see in a different way for the first time. One of the things about Van Gogh's work that was so amazing is that he saw everything is filled with energy, which is actually the way that it is. And for a little while, we can see the world that way, when we look through his eyes. Great musicians…There's a wonderful musician I love named Harry Pickens. He's actually a tremendous genius. He's a pianist, and he doesn't hear songs, he hears sound sculptures. Isn't that amazing? He makes sound sculptures that represent this complex feeling perception of the world in which people live. And when you listen to his music for a little while, you get to hear…You hear this thing he hears and as a result, you feel certain ways that he's feeling that he's captured in sound. And then you begin to look out at the world through those feelings and all of a sudden, you see a different dimension of the world than you saw before. So art, in its own way, acts as a de-patterning factor. It connects us to the metaphysical background of the world.
Why do you think Reagan hated it so much? Why do you think that the Republicans so attacked the National Endowment for the Arts? Because it was shifting the perceptual frame of the people who were encountering it. They wanted to make art “safe.” And you see that all the time with, you know, the movies, you know, the warnings on movies, the warnings on music, the warning on books, and they want to even actually have trigger warnings in schools now, before you read a book, right? This is ridiculous. Because art upsets. It shifts you out of that situated frame and you begin to see deeper into the world. So there's always been this massive connection between the use of hallucinogens of whatever sort of intoxicants Frederick Nietzsche would have put it. He said, “There's one indispensable prerequisite for art and that is intoxication.”
So even if you're just sitting in your room, and you go into the zone, that dreaming state, it's a kind of intoxication, but also there's a similarity. When you take intoxicants, it shifts the frame of reference in such a way that you're able to begin to play with the metaphysical background of the world to begin to shape it and thus affect what people experience when they encounter your art.
Ayana Young I guess one thing that was brought up for me is the child mind and I know that's brought up a lot – this idea of getting back to the mind, the unconditioned mind. And when we're talking about psychotropics or art, it feels like that's kind of touching on the adult version of what that could be again.
Stephen Harrod Buhner One of the things that happens when people get high is they get very childlike again. They move into a state of wonder. Time slows down and they have time to just sit and engage in the wonder of going, “OOh, that's so pretty. Oh, isn't that wonderful?” that we used to do when we were children until we retrained out of it. But one of the reasons why I've liked to talk about in my books so many different remarkable people, like Luther Burbank or Goethe. Einstein – in the Plant Intelligence book, I went into him for the first time – or Barbara McClintock or Masanobu Fukuoka. It doesn't matter who, they all became childlike the older that they got because they began to move into that state of wonder that we knew as children more and more and more all of the time. And Einstein was really clear about that. He said, “This is the state that true science is done from,” he said, “People try to make up it's all this other stuff. It's not true. It's this.” Every one of them said the same thing. If you want to understand what the world is saying to you, if you want to be able to follow it, where it leads, you have to have that childlike sense of wonder – the ability to take the time to see what's right in front of you and allow your imagination and those feelings to take you wherever they lead. That's fundamental.
And, you know, it's been popularized…The whole concept of a child mind into this sort of ridiculous… You know, it's almost a reflection of the narcissistic, self-involvement thing. And yeah, there's a certain dynamic about that. It's important to pay attention to your childlike self – to how unhappy you are in this job, or this apartment, or this city, or this relationship. That is really important and it conflicts with our Puritan background of, you know, that you just have to sort of toughen it up and suffer. That's important, but it's more than that. It's when the childlike self is pulled toward the greater world around you and it begins to have a love affair with matter, with the intelligence in matter, with the ability of matter of the livingness of the world to communicate because it's the child that understands that kind of communication. And that part of us grows more mature over time. Its essential nature is the same as it was when we were four years old, or nine months old…That the essential nature is the same. But if you use that part of you for 20, or 30, or 40 years, it becomes much more mature and sophisticated and its capacities, even though its essential identity remains the same. And out of that all of those great natural scientists that I talked about, that discovered so many wonderful things, all of them are really clear, our work came out of doing this. It did not come out of reductive science that they taught us in school. Never did, never will.
Ayana Young Well, it makes sense that science is more of an art than a science, like you've said in your lectures. And, it also makes sense that the child mind is so threatening to the powers that be and why so many children are being drugged these days with, you know, ADHD meds and depression medications and whatnot because, you know, the dominant culture is trying to strip that wonder and freedom out of our minds.
Stephen Harrod Buhner That's the last thing it needs is uncontrolled life. It doesn't want it. And, you know, I was just reading a thing the other day in London, in any area of London that they examined, they found between 500 and 700 out of every 1000 people were on antidepressants. Astonishing, astonishing. And the same thing is true in the United States, people…The point of depression, the point of feeling bad like that, it's information telling you there's something wrong with your circumstances.
When children are forced into these terrible school situations with no windows – and they look like prisons now and I think the contractors for prisons, the contractors for school, they're all the same people, they probably also do hospitals too, because they all feel like crap. And the thing is, these kids are there…They go,”This is horrible. This is horrible.” And they start to get more and more depressed and then, you know, some of them start to get hyperactive. Why? Because there's some part of them that's going, “Screw you, buddy. I don't want to sit here in this stupid chair. I want to move my body. I want to go learn about the world. I want to do all these things.”
And more and more schools are cutting out play period as being unimportant, right? And besides that playgrounds are too dangerous, you know, you might get hurt. So you have to just stay in this seat. How are they going to get them to stay in the seat and shut up to give them all of these drugs? And I remember, it's hilarious when my son went to school, half of his class were on some sort of mood altering drug like that, half. And this was in an elite prep school that for some reason he decided he wanted to go to. So he goes, and half of them are on this. Okay? So a lot of them are on Ritalin. And what did they do? They saved up their Ritalin, and then they would smash it up, and everybody would snort it when they studied for tests and for that test. So there's a whole underground network. You know, for us back when I was a teenager, who were smoking marijuana, and taking LSD. All of them now are like, you know, sharing Ritalin with each other. It's a whole different world. But the thing is, that child mind, the unrestrained exploratory nature, that wonder, the ability to know the Earth is alive, which I think is the most frightening part of childhood for the powers that be. They try to squash that from the beginning because it's too dangerous to the system in which it emerges.
Ayana Young I find myself back in school again and it's something that I'm really interested in, which is restoration ecology. But I was talking to some friends, they're like, “Oh, you're gonna have to read a lot and you're gonna have to get on top of these quizzes.” And I said, “You know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna read what I'm going to read.” But I had this very overwhelming sense that I was going to understand what I needed to understand through just being in the woods. And I wasn't nervous about having to be so contained in the academic bubble in order to restore landscapes. And it's not to say, I don't think that it's valuable information, but still, even in these topics that I really feel connected to, I find myself thinking some of it's really silly, you know–
Stephen Harrod Buhner A lot of it's really silly. I mean, a lot of it is written from the perspective of the scientists who are standing here watching the world over there, as if they're not connected. As if the scientist is not immersed in the ecological field that they're supposedly studying. Okay? They literally can't…As soon as they assume they can be an objective observer, which they are, virtually all of them do. As soon as that happens, something insane enters the topic because it's a fundamental flaw. We cannot become a dissociated observer, it's impossible. We cannot be an objective observer. We're immersed in the field. And the second thing that’s assumed is that the people, that the organisms that you're encountering, aren't communicating. That you're just watching them. So what really becomes important is, and that's the difference between holistic and reductive science. Holistic science assumes that you are embedded in the field. It assumes that everything's interactive and communicative. And so that changes everything. Then what happens is, you allow the organisms to teach you about themselves. You allow the ecosystem to teach you about itself and you become the student of it. You sit down at the foot of the blade of grass and begin to learn to stand, what it means to be grass. And what you find when you do that is entirely different than what you're going to find in books in the university settings. That's one of the reasons I love Schumacher College in the UK, because that's how they teach.
So we're in the midst of a conflict of paradigms here between that dissociative mentation and participatory holism, and what they're going to find is very different. We need people that are willing to be participatory holists, who are willing to be taught by the living intelligences of the earth, and come from that frame rather than this other orientation. It's the orientation of reductive science that creates the outcomes that have these really negative dynamics involved and you can't correct them using that system. It's impossible.
Ayana Young The invasive species debate is interesting because, again, it's not trusting Gaia. It's not trusting her to know what's best. We even kind of give it these enemy war like names. Um…
Stephen Harrod Buhner But we do. So it's like, you know, the Republicans hate illegal people aliens and the Democrats hate illegal plant aliens. You know both of them have a fear of the other. It's just manifested in a different way. You know and I've become very aware. I’ve studied invasive plant species for a long time. So I'm much more aware of them, but people, you know, will keep, you know, “Invasive species are really horrible.” So I started looking at zebra mussels and zebra mussels have moved into the Great Lakes and everybody's like, “Oh, this invasive species is ruining everything and we have to get rid of them. This is terrible.” But then you look at what they do. And that's always the question, “What is it doing?” That's the fundamental question you have to ask and virtually nobody does. They just go, “Oh, this doesn't belong here. So we're going to change it,” you know, “We're going to do all this stuff.” Very foolish.
Anyway, the zebra mussels move into the Great Lakes. Now the other, you know, shellfish like that have died off or whatever, but the zebra mussels are really hearty. They don't really like to be pushed around, they're going to push back. So they get in. And one of the major functions of things like mussels and oysters, shellfish is that they filter water. Okay? Zebra mussels filter water even more efficiently than those others do. And I forget the exact number. It's something like they can filter a gallon of water an hour or something like that. And I didn't…I don't remember the exact number, but it's something like that. And the thing is, they are beginning to clean out all of the pollutants out of the Great Lakes, which is really important. It's the ecosystem correcting itself. Okay, but what's more, they did this other really fascinating thing that they…There's all these factories lining the Great Lakes that are pulling water out and putting effluent back in, right? So what they do is they clog all of the intake and outflow pipes so that the factories can't work anymore. What better kind of way of counteracting the problem can you get by that? Right? I mean, it's like totally trying to shut them down and then it gets all over the docks, and the docks, you know, don't work and the ship holes and everything else, and it clogs all of the intake and outputs for the ships. It's really…And then people are like, “Oh, this is a horrible invasive species.” Well, no, it's not what it is. It's a corrective to ecological disturbance. That's what it is. Every time you see an invasive species move like this. It's a corrective to an ecological disturbance. The question is, “What is it doing here?” And that's where you have to begin.
Ayana Young It kind of reminds me of this quote that was something that you quoted of Rupert Sheldrake, who said, “The evangelists of science and technology have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the Missionaries of Christianity,” end quote.
Stephen Harrod Buhner It's really true. It's really true. You know, and it's like a lot of people especially reductive, you know, supposedly reductive skeptics, you know, mechanicalists as I like to say. That there are skeptics, of course they're not skeptical of their own skepticism which makes them not a skeptic, but rather a dogmatist and one sort or another. But you know, it's fascinating. They say that they're being rational. They get so emotional when you start bringing stuff like this up. Oh, they get really upset, but what's true is they've been promulgating a certain belief that even Darwin himself did not hold. Most of the people they cite did not hold these beliefs. And it's some weird psychological manipulation of this thing to match their own psychological orientation. It doesn't really have much to do with the world itself.
Ayana Young Do you think there could be a new, more integrated science like, you know, a, quote, “New science” that could be useful as a guide in the upcoming years, or, you know, like a central belief system that could help a healthier society?
Stephen Harrod Buhner Well, that's in what we're in the midst of. The Enlightenment was really a conflict between an old paradigm that didn't work. See, the Christian paradigm supplanted actually in a very positive and decent way, the older pantheistic paradigm of Rome and Greece. And most of the Christians then we're sort of animistic, pantheistic Christians, but as time went on, that system got more and more rigid and it's sort of like, the most conservative members of that group began to take it over and distort the whole thing until it became then….They began killing anybody that disagreed with them and it became this very horrible thing. And so the Enlightenment rose, as a counteract to that. And for a while, it was quite wonderful. And then the most conservative members of that group began to take over and just abuse the system so it more correctly reflected their own psychological limitations.
Now, we're in the midst of a paradigm shift again, and it's not any different than what has gone on before. We have a holistic paradigm coming into being, more spokesmen, more great writers, more innovators working with it, whether you're looking at Jim Lovelock or Lynn Margulis or David Abram or Martin Shaw or Stephen Harding, it doesn't really matter. There's Rupert Sheldrake. There's this great movement happening in its early stages that’s building more force, and there will be…This system will come more and more into being and eventually and ultimately supplant, you know, this sort of shadow side of the Enlightenment that sort of took over everything. And then there'll be one of the wonder for awhile and then of course, the more conservative members of our movement will take it over and distort the whole thing until it becomes horrible, and then something else will need to take its place. But these things work in like, you know, five-six hundred year cycles. So we're at the beginning of this paradigm shift and it's important to understand that paradigm shifts are not pleasant because everything that we see around us has its roots very deep in the reductive paradigm – all of the businesses, the churches, the cultures, everything, and they have huge survival investment in that old form. As that form begins to decay which has to because it doesn't work, it's not an accurate portrayal of the world in which we're living, this new one will come more into being but there's going to be tremendous amounts of disarray and disturbance as that process occurs. And there's just no way around that. I mean, it's both an exciting time. I mean, that's why the Chinese had that great curse. “May you live in interesting times.”It's not a blessing, it's a curse. I mean, that our times are about to become incredibly interesting.
Ayana Young It's not just an interesting time to be alive, but this is…It's an important time to be alive, not something to escape from, or run away from or, or wish that we weren't born in this time. You know, a lot of people go, “Oh, I wish I was born at a time that, you know, wasn't going through all of these cascading catastrophes,” and I've kind of gotten to a place where there's no chance of being bored in this life.
Stephen Harrod Buhner No, there's definitely not that. I mean, it's like if you want a boring life, you definitely were born into the wrong time. But it's a fascinating time. A lot of stuff's going to happen. There's going to be a lot of tremendous pain too, of course, but nevertheless, so many wonderful things are happening now. And it's truly for me at age 62, it's been a pleasure to be alive to be incarnate in the body and I just think it's been a magnificent journey.
Ayana Young So the human heart is a biological oscillator, meaning it creates an energetic field that extends outside our bodies. But, our brains and our guts are also oscillators with their own fields, which can be attuned to the heart, or can be out of sync. So I'm wondering if you can take us through this, maybe first the heart brain connection, and then we can talk about the purpose of the gut. You know, what role does the heart play beyond pumping blood, of course, in our physiology and our decision making, and our survival and so forth? And how does it collaborate with the brain? What happens if they're out of sync?
Stephen Harrod Buhner Well, the thing about the heart is…I mean, there's a tremendous amounts of very old folk wisdom that are still present in our culture about the importance of the heart being the seat of feeling, people being hard-hearted or cold hearted, you know, or somebody's broken-hearted. We know, but it can't quite go away, but nevertheless, we're trained that somehow it's a lesser thing or maybe we're just making it up or whatever. But what's really true is, as you mentioned, we have every self-organized thing, whether it's a white blood cell, our immune system, our pancreas, it doesn't matter, they're biological oscillators. And they create a field around them as they function. And the three strongest in the body are the heart, the brain and the GI tract. Actually, it's in descending order, it's heart, GI tract, brain.
So if you asked the members of non industrial cultures where they live in their body, they would gesture to the region of the chest, right. But if you ask somebody in the western world in America, you know, for instance, “Where do you live in your body?” They're going to point about an inch above the high eyebrows, and about two inches into the skull. What's happened is consciousness was relocated to a new place as the Enlightenment progressed, and that's had a really tremendous impact. So when you look at the heart, the heart extends this field that’s 5000 times stronger than the one the brain does. And, you know, it can be measured with the most subtle scientific instruments about 10 feet out from the body, but it continues out much farther than that. And literally, it's a field that surrounds us like fingers. It has the ability…That's where the source of non kinesthetic touching comes from the ability to feel the meanings in the world around us is when that field touches something else, right?
So we've all had that experience of, you know, when we're standing somewhere and somebody gets too close to us, they move into our space and we start to get really uncomfortable. What's happening is they're standing, you know, the field that surrounds us is strongest about 10 inches-12 inches from the body, you know, and then it begins to get progressively you know, softer, let's say as it gets farther and farther away. Like the Kalahari and nonindustrial cultures, they extend the heartfield out like sensitive fingers, very, very far indeed, miles, sometimes into the region. So they can feel things that are moving through their ecoregion. You know, but we don't really have it developed so it remains mostly unconscious unless somebody steps into our field, and then they're in our space. And that's discomfort. It's a feeling of that field touching something where we don't want to be touched there. But you can actually work with it to use the field intentionally to touch anything that you encounter. And just like your fingers touch things, only you're feeling the meanings that are in that thing.
Now, information is taken in through the heart first. If we deny our feeling sense, it remains mostly in the unconscious. But it goes into our heart and then our heart routes the information to our brain for analysis. The heart makes its own neurotransmitters as it needs them, has sensory neurons, and has the same kind of neurons in it that the brain has, uses the same neurotransmitters, and it has unmediated connections to the brain that can't be shut off so it flows in there and it goes up to the brain for analysis. So it's basically feeling first, thinking after. That's the way it works. So when the heart - because it's the strongest field, all of the other organs in the body can entrain with the heart. And everybody knows entrainment. It's when we're walking down the street with a friend and our steps begin to go in synchrony with each other, we entrain.
And if you want to drive your friends crazy, you can very subtly begin to alter your steps until you're out of sync with them and it'll start to really upset them because you have a natural capacity to enter. And this is how I entertain myself. Another thing you can do is when you're with somebody, you both start breathing at a similar rate and if you want to just drive your friends crazy, you can just hold your breath, but pretend that you're breathing for a really long time, and they'll start to get more and more uncomfortable. You know, these are just things you can do to entertain yourself anyplace you are.
And so anyway, all of the organs in our body because they’re biological oscillators. It’s just like musicians who all get in the zone together and train that they synchronize. All of our organs, the biological oscillators we have, they can entrain with the heart. And when they do that, the whole human body begins to work better. There's a guy in Denver there who was doing a lot of work…Goldsmith, Goldhammer, I forget…He was a cardiac surgeon and physician. He started teaching people heart entrainment. And people with high blood pressure, their blood pressure would drop like 50 points, and normalize. That's all they had to do. They didn't have to take pharmaceuticals right. Now the interesting thing is that if you locate consciousness in the brain, the consciousness can locate itself in any biological oscillator in the body that it wants, and then it can become its point of orientation.
So, most non-industrial cultures it was in the heart, like it is for the Kalahari. But for us, it's in the head. And so but the brain isn't, the field isn't strong enough for everything to synchronize with it. So you get partial synchronization, and you get kind of a dissociated syncopation that occurs, it's almost like a car where one of the cylinders isn't working properly, yet still goes, but not very well. And when you do that shift in the consciousness up into the brain, the very first thing you start getting is manifestations of heart disease, which is why the United States has more heart disease than any other country on Earth. And your blood pressure immediately starts to go up when you do that. This stuff has all been, it's not really airy fairy stuff. It's all really solidly grounded. Of course, the implications are, we need to shift our orientation which of course is not going to happen very easily. So that stuff's all really fascinating and it gives a nice physiological and neurological basis for heart perception and you can really see it as you entrain the heart or as you begin to go into a state of what Roland McCready calls ‘heart coherence,’ that your whole organism begins to work much more efficiently, much more healthily and a lot of the disease symptoms you have just begin to go away…stress levels, depression, everything shifts.
So…And I had been aware that the GI tract, for instance, had tremendous numbers of neurons in it that it very much like the brain. Its neural network is phenomenal. And I worked with that for, gee, 10 or 12 years before I began to understand the function of it. So I can talk about that in terms of bees, for instance. Now bees, when they approach nectar or anything that they're going to work with like that, their GI tract is creating a field just like I described in the heartfield that goes out from the body and it's about as powerful as the heart, maybe slightly less so. And so for instance, what are those Qigong people, they work a lot with the GI tract – the gut intelligence as a center, for instance. But anyway, so the bees are going out and that field touches the nectars that they're encountering. They can tell whether the nectar is poisonous or not just simply from the field interacting with the field of the nectar. It's obviously a very sophisticated survival dynamic where it allows us to be able to tell whether substances that we're going to eat are healthy for us or not. That turns out that there's two kinds of substances. One – we can, you know, these chemical structures that the GI tract field automatically will understand is healthy or not and then there's another group of substances that has to be calibrated. In other words, they have to be tasted first. And that's where you begin to understand why babies crawl around and put so many things in their mouth. The GI tract is calibrating its awareness of those molecular structures. Once it tastes at once it will calibrate whether or not it is healthy to be ingested. And it goes into sort of, not a library of feelings, but a library of gustatory intake, you might say. So that field for us can be tremendously sophisticated, see.
Look at what we've got and it makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective to enhance our adaptive survival, that our heartfield when we move through the world and encounters meanings that are in the place we're going to. So as soon as everybody's had that experience, they say, “Let's go to this new restaurant.” They go into the restaurant, they stop just inside the door, and they go, “This place feels funny, let's go someplace else.” That's the heartfield encountering the meanings in that place, rounding it to the brain for analysis. And you might not be able to exactly say why, but you know there's something wrong and so you go someplace else. The GI tract – you wander through the world, you need some food, and it touches these substances around you and it's able to determine whether or not the substance should be taken in or not. It makes perfect sense. But we've also been trained to not pay attention to that part of our central intelligence as well.
And one of the things that's true, we're a series of nested intelligences. We're not a single I, a single ego, a single point of view. There's many intelligences inside every human being. All of us know that. We've had arguments with ourselves many times. One part takes over, controls our mouth, says the most ridiculous thing in a social circumstance and then leaves, leaving us responsible for cleaning up the mess. Everybody's had that happen. So these are just some of the nested intelligences that are in us that are there as part of our inner council. really, to help us adapt and move through the world in the most optimum way possible. It's a truly miraculous adventure.
Ayana Young It is so difficult for me to stop myself from asking thousands of more questions from you. So I would like to leave you with the floor and just whatever you'd like to end on whatever you'd like to share. The mic is yours.
Stephen Harrod Buhner So the one thing that I always like to end with for everybody has to basically say, “Look, don't let anybody…don't let anybody convince you that your feelings are not real. Trust your feeling sense.” You know, the thing is that there's this huge belief in our culture, and I'm running up against it more, you know, assertively, I guess? More all the time now, I guess, because I'm just getting older and more curmudgeonly and I'm tired of being nice about it. But there's this huge belief that elites that you know, people with PhDs and that have studied all of these things, that they're the way out. But they're not. They’re the reason we're in this mess to begin with. And all of those people, the vast majority of there's a few exceptions, but the vast majority have been trained out of their feelings since a long time ago. And the thing is, the way the Earth works is it trusts the individual genius of every organism here to innovate solutions to the problems that we encounter and the area in which we live. And our way out is the individual genius of human beings trusting their feeling sense and following it where it leads. And there's so much amazing stuff that comes out of this.
I mean, I wrote, as a part of my book, Lost Language of Plants, I talked about the importance of wild water. My great-grandfather gave me wild water to taste one day. And of course, my mother caught me drinking wild water, shortly thereafter, told me it would kill me and began to instill in me a fear of the wildness of the world, right, and then I got used to the taste of domesticated water. The journey back to wild water is a long one for all of us. Nevertheless, it's absolutely crucial and it's the individual genius of people that begins to pull them in these directions. And then years later, I became aware of Daniel Vitalis’s work, and how they started a website for people so they can find sources of wild water all around the United States, wherever they travel, so they would never have to drink domesticated water again. These things that we do together. We belong to a group of people who are not bounded by geography or time. We're doing this work that we're being called to do, and each of us is trusting our individual genius to do it and that's the way it needs to be for us to find our way out. So the most important thing, the greatest act of disobedience that any of us can engage in is to trust our feeling sense and reclaim the response of the heart to what's presented to the sense.
Ayana Young Thank you for listening to Unlearn and Rewild. Our guest today has been Steven Harrod Buhner. The music you heard first was by the Mount Fuji Doom Jazz Corporation, “Doing Murder Amongst Mannequins.” Then, Spooky Tooth with “Sunshine Helped Me” and, lastly, Eric Dolphy's tune, “Hat and Beard.” Our theme music is "Like a River" by Kate Wolf. Our production is by March Young.