Animism and Nature's intelligence; Animal/Plant/Fungi Languages

[enjoypolo]

The subject of Nature's many languages, in the Animal, but also plant/fungi kingdom is a fascinating topic to me. Anyone who's had a pet in their lives can probably attest to communicating with their animals at a non-verbal level. Plants and Fungi are fascinating creatures, and very sophisticated as well. Watching, overtime, a patch of growing mycelium literally puts one in awe, like looking at the neuron-network in a brain (or even the cosmic web!).
I thought of grouping these topics in this thread.

Gordon White, on his podcast RuneSoup has posted some excellent episodes on this topic. One was a scientific researcher turned botanist, Monica Gagliano. Her book, Thus The Plant Spoke which I have only begun, but as she describes in the podcast, is excellent material. She describes it as "phyto-biography" because the Plants demanded she write this book.

Basically telling her scientific and spiritual journey which began her on a Ayahuasca journey in Peru, in which the sacred vines have been guiding her before/during/after the ceremony. Long story short, she demonstrates how plants not only talk to each other, but they talk to us, if only we are able to listen to them.

The other one was his Solo show on mushroom tripping advice (so much to talk about as well!) but one point that stood out was: Acknowledge her; Talk to her (the mushroom spirit); and tease her a bit. Most importantly, ask her what you need for your healing journey.

This then leads me to Paul Stamets who just tweeted, an article pointing to some researchers in Virginia who may have "cracked" the universal language of bees by analyzing their waggle dance, as well as noise level. The article mentions that this works as well with bees in England, or in Virginia.

My hypothesis is that, since all is born from the Field, all are linked (and communicating) through it as well.
And I've witnessed more than one person telling me they are in touch with Dolphins and Whales, which I was taken aback first, but hey, it makes sense to me. It also seemed to be what that the Float Tank inventor, John Lilly, was involved in with his experiments.

On that note, I think Music is one such universal language, and I've noticed (in hindsight) that the people whose musical taste I enjoy, I often connect with easily (and vice-versa). So there might be something there.

 

[rani]

I live in the bush and spend more time with my plants and animals than I do with people. I think the boundaries between the plant and animal kingdom are a lot more fuzzy than people are taught to think.

Found this lovely video of a Canadian forest scientist talking about how trees communicate. She has demonstrated that mother trees recognise and favour their offspring, and trees even cooperate between different species.

 

[rani]

oh, and while you mentioned whales. Have you seen a close up of a blow hole?

Blowhole

• rani
• Apr 3, 2019

If that is not human-style nose that has slid to the top of a whales head to make breathing while swimming easier, then I don't know what is.

 

[enjoypolo]

oh, and while you mentioned whales. Have you seen a close up of a blow hole?

Blowhole

• rani
• Apr 3, 2019

If that is not human-style nose that has slid to the top of a whales head to make breathing while swimming easier, then I don't know what is.

Holy crap, that's amazing, I had never noticed the nose! Incredible stuff
And yes, trees indeed are very wise and complex ecosystems, eh? In fact, the maple tree leaf seed looks like a whale's tail too! Vortex propulsion, right?

 

[enjoypolo]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3493423/

I live in the bush and spend more time with my plants and animals than I do with people. I think the boundaries between the plant and animal kingdom are a lot more fuzzy than people are taught to think.

Found this lovely video of a Canadian forest scientist talking about how trees communicate. She has demonstrated that mother trees recognise and favour their offspring, and trees even cooperate between different species.

Great talk packed with incredible information. As Above, So Below. Read a great book on the subject a few years ago called The Hidden Life of Trees. I remember thinking, there has to be/needs to be a Pixar-type films with trees as protagonists (same with Planets).

I moved from Japan to BC, Canada originally, for my university studies, but as I look back, I really got a kick from the Land, with its pristine beauty and wilderness, the place where I've had my life-changing (life-giving) psychedelic (therapeutic) experiences, and of course my most valuable relationships made.
And yet, from an anthropocentric perspective, this place isn't really good at preserving all that beauty. But my guess is that, the plants, and Nature is hard working on it, and they know what they're doing.

Speaking of Paradoxes, I just finished reading Monica Gagliano's book Thus Spoke The Plant, and I have to say, it blew my mind away. Rarely has a book given me such visceral emotions and brought me to tears from sheer beauty in the words. It's a short book (not more than 130pages) but every word in it contains spirit essence. I love reading books that shatter your pre-conceptions about something we take for granted, like plants.

For me, the first time I started realizing plants were talking was when I grew cannabis in my closet with my former roommates circa 2014.
What started as a fun and reckless endeavour became an important classroom, and a bonding experience with them. No different from taking care of pets. Not to mention the pain, joy, and humility of harvesting and inhaling the plants you loved.

But mostly, it was their resilience in the face of stress (from me, and the environment), and the acid-fuel conversations (I thought they were monologues; I now know they were, in fact, dialogues) have inspired me tremendously. For instance, a slow growing plant sometimes benefits from a traumatic stress, and you'd never know it went through all that by just looking at it. Paradoxes that I subsequently had to deal with in my own life.
And so things like that, although I wasn't conspiracy-"woke" until 2016, I had an intuition about the holo-fractal nature of the world. But I digress.

The book is filled with indigenous plant medicinal insights, as well as genius lab experiments that the Plants explicitly guided Monica to perform. The Mimosa experiment is an iconoclastic one, by showing that plants, Mimosa in this case, have memory and habit formation without a "brain" à-la-humans. Huge implications for a scientific paradigm whose premise is reductionist materialism. Where is memory "stored"? (What is Memory?)

But most importantly at least for me, were the words spoken by the wise plants and trees, including the Ayahuasca vines, about Us, how we fell for the identity trap (Perception Deception in Icke-ian terms) and the illusion of separation (Wetiko mind); and the reality of who we are: Infinite beings that came on this planet each with his/her own Map held tight between the tiny palms of a baby, and how we can find that Map again, guided by the Light.
It was very astonishing to me, how the author was able to put into words, concepts that I too had experienced in trans-states, but that go beyond my ability to express in words.
To take one last example, is the reversal of Black & White with each other. Answers are often embedded within the Question, if asked properly.
In Photoshop, you can select a section of an image and use the "Inverse selection" tool which will select all, but the selection. Forgive me for this gibberish, but it was an epiphany for me at the time, that I still can't manage to express properly. Fundamentally, it's Perspective.

I was blessed this book was available at my local library, but if not, it would well be worth the money. Very profound reading, and highly recommended.

Let me share below, a few books, articles that are featured on the footnotes in the book for further insights:

Articles (published by Dr Gagliano, and others):
Acoustic and magnetic communication in plants: Is it possible? (2012)
Green symphonies: a call for studies on acoustic communication in plants (2013)
Books

• https://www.singingtotheplants.com (Stephan Beyer, 2009)
• Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany (SUNY series on Religion and the Environment), Matthew Hall, 2011
• Food Of The Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs and Human Evolution, Terence McKenna, 1999
• Whisperings of the Dragon: Shamanic Practices to Awaken Your Primal Power, Lujan Matus, 2014
• Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures), Donna Haraway, 2016

Media

 

[enjoypolo]

I finished watching this follow-up discussion & Q&A at the Bioneers conference. It’s impossible to emphasize how powerful Monica’s words are, many times, they make my hair stand out and tears off my eyes with joy. I resonate much more at her frequency than I do with Michael Pollan, whom while I have respect for, still seems to stand skeptical of much that is below the tangible surface (but honest enough to admit his biases).

I recently fucked up and killed two of my cannabis seedlings by accidentally giving too much phytoplankton fertilizer, and they burnt.
I still feel terrible about it, partly because they seemed to love each other very much. But I also feel as if they’d chosen that selfless life to teach me an important lesson to learn.
The bottomless empathy that plants, and Nature in general gives, is transcendent of species.
It makes me appreciate each opportunity to interact with people, as well as plants more.

One day, I very much hope that we can have plants, trees, or even bees, to come on the THC podcast, to share with us their wisdom so that we may co-evolve and regenerate.

I’m gonna switch gears a bit, but I dunno where else to post this. As I was pouring myself hot water in my cup last night, I tend to swirl/vortex the water, in this case using a spoon to cool it down.

I love to just stare at the shimmer present (if you have a light source above its easier to see). Then it dawned on me that you can see the shimmering spirals very clearly. And it reminded me of those Norwegian sky swirls.
I deduced from that experience, that maybe they’re both expressing a change in the density, in my cup between cold and hot water; in the sky perhaps as well. I don’t really know where i’m going with this, probably nowhere (or on the other end of a wormhole .
But somehow it was like an aha moment.
And yes, I’m most definitely on the asperger’s spectrum

 

[enjoypolo]

I picked up two wonderful books from my local library by Tristan Gooley. I’m not doing proper justice to him but he’s a brit natural navigator who spends most of his life outdoors, and a very talented chap at navigating using clues found in Nature incl. the stars, trees.
In a way, trees, wind, and water are communicating with us.

The book I just started is called: How to read Water: clues and patterns from puddles to the sea.
Since I love reading about Water, this is a real gem. Only couple chapters in, but Gooley weaves in ancient islamic wisdom in sea navigation (Isharat) as well as observational clues from just watching water in a glass at home.
In the age of GPS, this is a powerful tool to learn how to “read the landscape”.

The short video below illustrates the kind of a guy he is.
Since my whole life I grew up and lived in cities, but longed to know more about my environment, I’m pleased with his candid educational material for natural navigation, including using stars as a compass, and honing your pocahontas skills (aka ESP).

 

[shamangineer]

I have this book for navigating during magnetic field disturbances, I think I picked it up before his first book came out:
https://www.amazon.com/Finding-Your-Way-Without-Compass/dp/048640613X

I might have to check Gooley's books out, they sound like they expand on the techniques outlined in Harold Gatty's book.

 

[shamangineer]

From one of the reviewers of the Gatty book, it sounds like it is still the gold standard for primitive navigation over Gooley. So be sure to check that book out.

 

[enjoypolo]

Thank you

From one of the reviewers of the Gatty book, it sounds like it is still the gold standard for primitive navigation over Gooley. So be sure to check that book out.

Thank you SG, I’m putting it in my list of reads.
It got me looking at the environment a whole more curiously. Magickal stuff

 

[enjoypolo]

Fantastic Fungi (2019) Directed by Louie Schwartzberg

Just came across this trailer thru Paul Stamets, whose work is featured in this documentary about fungi. Couldn’t be happier to learn about this film!

https://twitter.com/paulstamets/status/1160949040168595456?s=21

 

[sirujux]

probably a repost but that's pretty cool growing all thit in the city

 

[enjoypolo]

Octopus dreaming (and changing colours while asleep):

 

[shamangineer]

 

[enjoypolo]

I'd been reading this book, The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins, and it starts with the Baxter effects (how plants communicate with us, and other plants telepathically).

Edit: Just stumbled upon this:
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...plants-make-ultrasonic-squeals-when-stressed/

Woud love to be able to "hear" what the plants feel into sound, wouldn't you?

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsfs.2018.0029
This is a paper published last year about the potential of using mycelial networks interfacing with computers (through electrical stimulation of the fruiting bodies (aka thru mushrooms with electrodes). This may be the next breakthrough in Inter-species communication, including, Nature-based communication systems. Although I'm going on a limb here.

Spoiler: 5.3 Application Domains (of mycelial computing)

Likely application domains of fungal devices could be large-scale networks of mycelium which collect and analyse information about environment of soil and, possibly, air and execute some decision-making procedures. Fungi ‘possess almost all the senses used by humans’ [106]. Fungi sense light, chemicals, gases, gravity and electric fields. Fungi show a pronounced response to changes in a substrate pH [110], demonstrate mechanosensing [111]; they sense toxic metals [112], CO2 [113] and direction of fluid flow [114]. Fungi exhibit thigmotactic and thigmomorphogenetic responses, which might be reflected in dynamic patterns of their electrical activity [115]. Fungi are also capable of sensing chemical cues, especially stress hormones, from other species [116], thus they might be used as reporters of health and well-being of other inhabitants of the forest. Thus, fungal computers can be made an essential part of distributed large-scale environmental sensor networks in ecological research to assess not just soil quality but the overall health of the ecosystems [117–119].

PS: I love this part:

Acknowledgements
I acknowledges [sic] pearl oyster mushrooms P. ostreatus for their cooperation in the studies.

Edit: Now this gets interesting. Check this out. Same author of the study, Andy Adamatzky is cited in this article, looking for people to work on this project. They're talking about the problem of dry-mycelium = not functional. Solution: Inject the substrate with nanoparticles!
It's a chemtrail analog but for the mycelium. As Above So Below I guess. Fascinating!

Adamatzky told The Reg: "Living fungi can sense and compute. However, while the monolith building 'grows', some parts of the substrate dry and mycelium dies. Dried mycelium would not compute. Thus we got the idea of 'filling' the mycelium with various functional nanoparticles before it dries. If we allow mycelium to 'eat' nanoparticles which have properties of electronic elements, then, when the mycelium dies, it will remain functional, as a network of micro-wires, transistors, capacitors and memristors."

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/17/like_computers_love_fungus/

Going deep down the mycelial rabbit hole it seems:
http://myceliumns.net/index.html
http://www.fungar.eu
https://www.nanotopia.net/the-mycelium-martian-dome-project

More Fungi Genius while we're at it:
Slime Mold paints Ideal US road map:

Comparison between existing roads and slime mold insights. Pretty F-ing cool!

Last update I promise:
Go watch this film if you can! Fantastic Fungi:
https://fantasticfungi.com/screenings/

 

[chaosandorder]

I'm currently resding this book as well.

 

[enjoypolo]

https://fantasticfungi.com/connect/



One of the silver lining of this epidemic shutting down public gatherings, is the shift to digital.
The new documentary, Fantastic Fungi featuring Paul Stamets and other researchers, will be streamed live on March 26th with a live Q&A session as well! (sign-up at the link) Very excited to be able to catch this film from the comfort of my home-isolation

Spending more time home with the plants has served as good therapy. I've also been spending time at a local farm and it's a great feeling to be in contact with fertile soil and life. For some reason, I intuitively feel that being exposed to microbia is more important now than ever.