Buhner, Stephen Harrod. _The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature_. Rochester, Vt.: Bear & Co., 2004. # Progressive Summary # Key Points # Comments # Quotes > The primary mode of cognition that the practitioners of science have used during the past century—analytical, linear, reductionistic, deterministic, mechanical—has begun to reach the limits of its assumptions. For the particular mode of cognition used by scientists, and the system to which that mode has given rise, can only maintain coherence by leaving out or ignoring a great many events that did and do not fit within the neat system it created. > There is, however, another mode of cognition, one our species has used as our primary mode during the majority of our time on this planet. This can be termed the holistic/intuitive/depth mode of cognition. > There is tremendous hubris—and dangerous environmental perturbations—in disregarding the wisdom of the ancestors who have gone before us, people who said that they learned about the world not from the ability of their minds to work as analytical, organic computers, but from their hearts as organs of perception. > This gathering of knowledge directly from the wildness of the world is called biognosis—meaning “knowledge from life”—and, because it is an aspect of our humanness inherent in our physical bodies, it is something that everyone has the capacity to develop. > This ancient mode of cognition is crucially important for us, as a species, to reclaim, for we live in dangerous times. The threats to ourselves and the planet that is our home have never been more dire. These threats come from ways of thinking that are not sustainable, that bear little relation to the real world, and that are an inevitable error inherent in the linear fanaticism and mechanomorphism (seeing the world as a machine) of contemporary perspectives. They are threats that come from the dominance of one particular mode of cognition to the exclusion of all others. On being held by his grandfather, and the merging rhythms of their hearts: > And without this bonding, this joining of two living beings, what is life? What is life without this exchange of soul essence but tasteless food in some dusty and empty place. And what are we then but abandoned and crumpled newspapers, yesterday’s stories blowing down some wind-swept, darkened street. And then again when he bonded with nature in the Rocky Mountains: > And without this bonding, what is life? What is life without this exchange of soul essence between the human and the wildness of the world? Tasteless food in some dusty and empty place rising in geometric precision out of an empty plain. A mathematical life forced into place by bulldozer and concrete and Man. And what are we then but abandoned and crumpled newspapers, stories without meaning, blowing down some wind-swept, darkened street. > And though I had been taught in school that the wildness of the world was cold and uncaring, unfeeling, and ruled by tooth and claw, I did not find it so. It gave me all that I have ever wanted to have and began to teach me a truth that I had not learned in school, a truth plain in its every line, and movement, and turning. For Nature does not know how to lie. It is such a simple observation that there are no straight lines in Nature. But it is a door into Nature’s heart. > The truth is that in the real world, in Nature, quantification is always a projection of arbitrary human decisions. It is always subjective. Nature contains no fixed, measurable quantities. > We often think, because we are so thoroughly immersed in Euclid’s imaginary world in school and by our culture, that there are quantities in Nature. We are shown a number of oranges and we think there is a quantity—seven, perhaps. But number and quantity are not the same thing. As Gregory Bateson admonishes, “You can have exactly three tomatoes. You can never have exactly three gallons of water. Always quantity is approximate.” Nature may contain numbers of things, but it contains no quantities of things—only qualities. > And when we are taught, and come to believe, that rigorous thinking, that scientific thinking, occurs only with the exactitude of quantification, we embark on a course that is more a reflection of the kind of thinking we are engaged in (and unconscious, unexamined projections) than it is the real world. It has almost nothing to do with the real world or Nature. It is, in fact, crazy. > I have never known a clergyman or a professor who could be more narrow, bigoted, and intolerant than some scientists, or pseudoscientists. . . Intolerance is a closed mind. Bigotry is an exaltation of authorities. Narrowness is ignorance unwilling to be taught. And one of the outstanding truths I have learned in my University [of Nature] is that the moment you reach a final conclusion on anything, set that conclusion up as a fact to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be taken away, and refuse to listen to any new evidence, you have reached an intellectual dead-center, and nothing will start the engine again short of a charge of dynamite. . . Ossified knowledge is a dead-weight to the world, and it does not matter in what realm of man’s intellectual activities it is found. . . Any obstinate clinging to outworn doctrines, whether of religion or politics or morality or of science, are equally damning and equally damnable. —LUTHER BURBANK > One of our great limitations is our tendency to look only at the static picture, the one confrontation. We want one-picture answers; we want key pictures. But we are now discovering that they are not available. – Buckminster Fuller > When we allowed science to convince us that there is no soul or intelligence in matter, the Earth’s physical forms became only cemetery markers showing where spirits once moved through the world. The autopsy of the material world then began in earnest. Its dissected parts now litter the landscape and we walk, depressed, among lifeless statuary, only accidental lifeforms on the surface of a ball of rock hurtling around the sun. The metal gate is unlocked. Other kinds of flowers nod in sunlight outside that wrought-iron fence. > Semen is Latin for a dormant, fertilized, plant ovum— a seed. Men’s ejaculate is chemically more akin to plant pollen. See, it is really more accurate to call it mammal pollen. To call it semen is to thrust an insanity deep inside our culture: that men plow women and plant their seed when, in fact, what they are doing is pollinating flowers. Now. Doesn’t that change everything between us? > Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need  for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real  universe is always one step beyond logic. - Frank Herbert > Life will never be found in the DNA nor any part of the whole.  Life is the thing that is more than the sum of the  parts, the thing that happens at the moment of self-  organization, the nonlinear quality that comes into  being at the moment of synchronicity.