Quotes from Stephen Harrod Buhner

Continually trying to look on the bright side interferes with our finding the wisdom that lies in the fruitful darkness. Continually striving upward toward the light means we never grow downward into our own feet, never become firmly rooted on the earth, never explore the darkness within and around us, a darkness without whose existence the light would have no meaning.

Fifteen years ago I had an odd dream. In it, a medicinal plant that I was interested in, an Usnea lichen that is ubiquitous on trees throughout the world, told me that while it was good for healing human lungs it was primarily a medicine for the lungs of the planet, the trees. When I awoke, I was amazed. It had never occurred to me in quite that way that plants have some life and purpose outside their use to human beings.

James Hillman so eloquently put it, "It was only when science convinced us that nature was dead that it could begin its autopsy in earnest." A living, aware, and soul-filled world does not respond well to autopsy.

All the complex life-forms that we see were formed through symbiogenesis, a term coined by the person who first recognized its existence, Lynn Margulis.

Symbiogenesis is the formation of more complex life-forms from the union of two dissimilar, simpler ones.

One finding is important for understanding the nature of our sexuality as men. That is that male infants, in the womb, have regular erections—so do male infants after birth. Our sexuality is as much a part of us as breathing, our need for food, our need for love.

Albert Hofmann once put it . . . All attempts today to make amends for the damage through environmentally protective measures must remain only hopeless, superficial patchwork, if no curing of the "Western entelechy neurosis" ensues. . . . Healing would mean existential experience of a deeper, self-encompassing reality.

In other words, what you believe—that is, the descriptions of the world around you that you received in childhood—act much like software; they program what is perceivable by your conscious mind.

The self-organized bacterial membrane that is Gaia has constantly, over very long time lines, increased the complexity of its structure in order to stabilize itself and to more effectively deal with perturbations to the system.

Gaia does not use top-down control over the parts that make up the whole. that approach is the least adaptable and least functional of all

Neuroimaging in the brain shows that once the areas of the brain that process incoming sensory data are sensitized to incoming data, that is, once the gating channels are opened more widely, the sections of the brain that gate that particular type of sensory data stay open. The baseline gating level increases even if the degree of sensory stimulus is not increased. The metaphysical background of the world begins to emerge into sensing on a regular basis.

What you intend when you approach something in the world determines, to varying extents, the degree of sensory gating that occurs as you perceive that phenomenon. Intent, task demands, cognitive template, and gating defaults all affect what you sensorally perceive when a part of the exterior world and you meet. More colloquially, all of us see what we expect to see.

3) if you wish, you can shift consciousness itself more directly by directly increasing the apertures of your sensory gates, by opening the doors of perception themselves more widely. You can do this a number of ways, hallucinogens are one of them meditation is another habituation to constantly feeling the touch of the world upon you is another

To know how cherries and strawberries taste, ask children and birds. GOETHE

Goethe put it over two centuries ago . . . Life as a whole expresses itself as a force that is not to be contained within any one part. . . . The things we call the parts in every living being are so inseparable from the whole that they may be understood only in and with the whole.

Invasive plants—Earth's way of insisting we notice her medicines.

Golda looked back at me—those peaceful eyes!—and said in the most penetrating voice I had ever heard, 'Because the Nazis taught me this: There is a Hitler inside each of us and if we do not heal the Hitler inside of ourselves, then the violence, it will never stop.

In complex organisms the head, or anterior pole of the body, is the part that processes information, the posterior pole the part that engages in sexual reproduction and excretion of waste. From that orientation plants live with their heads in the Earth, their asses in the air. We love the smell, usually, of their reproductive organs and pick them to give to our beloveds (a highly suggestive though unconscious act). We don't, most of us, really know plants at all.

Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop'd. I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell. —WALT WHITMAN

The tree does not end at it's skin but exists also in the rain that falls downwind, many miles from the forest. In the seed exists the acorn, the oak, and the shade.

It turns out that Clark's Nutcrackers use a highly sophisticated form of triangulation to determine cache locations. When they make a cache they visually locate two landscape features in order to triangulate their cache.

When we use a measuring tape, we are using a system of numbers that is human invented. What are the birds using? And further, how are they storing it in memory? To be stored in memory the measurements have to be encoded in some form and that form has to have an internal consistency to it. In other words it has to possess the same kind of structural integrity as our system of mathematical measurement.

A Bulgarian study of 17,862 patients found that honey was effective in improving chronic bronchitis, asthmatic bronchitis, bronchial asthma, chronic and allergic rhinitis, and sinusitis.

Rightly did Darwin pin up a paper warning himself to be careful about using the words "higher" and "lower." MARY MIDGLEY