An Ode to EmPower

Across seven seas, when you were born
Never so bright had the sun ever shone
As a little baby, you were given all care
To grow and give happiness everywhere
And your mothers searched all high and low
For the name that would light the happy glow
Empower, Empower, Empower, Empower!

We walked hand in hand with you
To catch little flowers with the morning dew
And when you ran all along the way
We ran with you, all night, all day.
Together we blazed a trial of light
Of knowledge that has shone so bright
They’ve asked for more, Friends old and new
You’ve stood by each time they’ve called out to you.
Empower, Empower, Empower, Empower!

This day our family is larger still
Brimming with joy our cups are filled
We’ll tell them all to call out to you
For the knowledge you will spread their way
You’ll take your place in a million hearts
And win such friends as will never part
As your name will ring across the world.
Empower, Empower, Empower, Empower!

By Sudhakar D R

Can Plants Read Our Minds?

One of my friends got himself a pet plant. It was a Dracaena. He was very happy with his newly found companion. He told me about it. The plant name made me think. Hadn’t I heard about it before? But where? Oh yes, I remember!

Modern world’s tryst with this plant started on February 2, 1966. Cleve Backster, who was an Interrogation Specialist (an experienced Polygraph analyst) with the CIA back then, had a Dracaena plant in the lab.

One day he was watering his plant and looking at its long green leaves. A crazy thought struck him suddenly (as always when something new is discovered). Instinctively he attached the end of a leaf to an electrode connected to the polygraph.

And lo, the pen started to scribble something on the paper! And to his shock, Cleve Backster noticed that the chart resembled a human response on a polygraph. He felt that it was so similar to a person taking a lie-detector test.

Lie detectors detect any abnormal readings when the subject responds to certain threats.The basic response would be towards “Fear.” So Cleve began to think about ways by which he could threaten the plant. First he tried placing a neighboring leaf in a cup of warm coffee. The plant didn’t show much response towards it. After a few minutes he imagined burning the leaf he was testing. He didn't say it aloud, touch the plant or the equipment. The only new thing that could have stimulated the plant was the mental image. Yet the plant sensed it and went crazy; this was indicated by the pen which jumped right off the top of the chart.

Immediately he understood that something that was previously unknown was going on. There were no other explanations. After this, Cleve talked to scientists from different fields, trying to get some answers. But they didn’t have any. It was new to them. So he started to design an experiment in greater depth to explore, what he called the “Primary Perception.”

Backster noted reactions in plants when even the smallest of cells like Lacto bacilli, were killed in front of it. He also noted that they remembered a person who had earlier done harm to another plant nearby.

Cleve Backster published his research in the International Journal of Parapsychology (Evidence of a Primary Perception in Plant Life, vol. 10, no. 4, Winter 1968, pp. 329–348).

This discovery brought about a craze among many housewives and secretaries and among the common people, who started talking to their plants, watering it and caring for it!

Despite the lack of any scientific support for the presence of plant perception, the idea was accepted by many as not only true but as having been verified by numerous scientific studies. In fact, after many years, parapsychologists coined a new term ‘the Backster effect’ – the power of plants to understand human thought by "reading" a human’s "bioenergetic field".

We Indians from time immemorial believe that plants are the personification of GOD. In the ancient texts it’s written that plants have life and can communicate too. A long time ago at the start of the 19th century, Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose showed through his delicate instruments how plants had life.

The book The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher O. Bird is just amazing. I would suggest it to anyone interested in knowing more about the life of plants and different experiments carried out through out the world to prove it. It’s a wonderful book. Go read it!

The next time you see a plant with the dried up leaves, don’t just move on, it might be asking you for some water!

References:
The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher O. Bird
Wikipedia

By Guruvardhan