Quotes from Stephen Harrod Buhner

The brain that we think of as a necessity for intelligence is only one possible form a neural network can take and that is determined by ecological function and species shape; it is not essential to intelligence. As neurologist Antonio Damasio puts it, "the mind is embodied, not just embrained.

And even though these words are moving into you through a visual medium—the printed words on this page—as you became immersed in this book, you no longer saw the words as a visual input. You'd left that surface orientation behind. You began, then, to work with, and experience, the meanings that these words are only the containers for.

Those who have lost, as James Hillman put it, the response of the heart to what is presented to the senses, are sometimes so trained to believe that the objects outside them have no "feeling reality" to them that all feeling inflows of that sort are gated entirely.

The door to the soul is unlocked; you do not need to please the door keeper, the door in front of you is yours, intended for you, and the doorkeeper obeys when spoken to. ROBERT BLY

And as he quite rightly went on to say . . . For man has closed himself up, till he sees thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.

physicist Paul Davies comments, nonlinear systems "possess the remarkable ability to leap spontaneously from relatively featureless states to those involving complex cooperative behavior."5 And those behaviors? They can be as different as water to ice.

Man] sees the morning as the beginning of a new day; he takes germination as the start in the life of a plant, and withering as its end. But this is nothing more than biased judgment on his part. Nature is one. There is no starting point or destination, only an unending flux, a continuous metamorphosis of all things. —Masanobu Fukuoka, THE NATURAL WAY OF FARMING

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction. ALBERT EINSTEIN

Robert Heinlein once put it . . . Man is a rationalizing animal not a rational one.

To live in right relationship with Creation means honoring the creation of the body itself, recognizing its inherent sacred nature, and developing a deep, trustworthy relationship with it. For there is only one place in all the Universe that has been made especially for you, and that is inside your own body.

We have lost, as James Hillman once put it, the response of the heart to what is presented to the senses.

Consider Norbert Mayer's poem Just now A rock took fright When it saw me It escaped By playing dead

Richard Lewontin comments . . . To be convinced that all behavior on the part of others, without distinction, is hostile, is a form of mental illness.57

Things To Avoid Hops and beer. The potent estrogen, estradiol, found in large quantities in hops, plays a powerful role in increasing prostate size and is strongly implicated in both BPH and prostate cancer. Hopped beer should be avoided at all cost. Some studies have found that beer consumption is directly related to prostate inflammation. Other estrogenic plants such as licorice and black cohosh should be avoided as well.

Our relationship to food is a microcosm of all that we have learned about loving and being loved, about our self-worth. It is the stage upon which we reenact our childhood. If we were abused, we will abuse ourselves with food. The degree to which we are violent, abusive, self-punishing is in proportion to the degree of violence, abuse, and punishment we received. We learned how to do it by having it done to us.2

deep humility. There is nothing the arrogant hate more.

Rupert Sheldrake puts it, "The evangelists of science and technology have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the missionaries of Christianity.

Richard Lewontin observes . . . In Cladocera, small fresh-water arthropods, reproduction remains asexual as long as conditions of temperature, oxygen dissolved in the water, food availability, and degree of crowding remain constant. Then, if a sudden change in these conditions occurs . . . the Cladocera switch to sexual reproduction. . . . The organisms are detecting a rate of change of an input, not its absolute value. They are performing mathematical differentiation.22

To avoid this infiltration the bacteria alter the permeability of their cell membranes, often by altering the structure of the doorways that let outside substances into the cell. This makes it harder, or impossible, for antibiotics to sneak in — essentially keeping the level of the drug below that needed to affect the bacteria.

Sometimes bacteria learn how to live and prosper in antimicrobial environments, such as the cleaning solutions in hospitals. As one journal article put it, "Contamination, mainly by Gram-negative bacteria, was found in 10 freshly prepared solutions and in 21 of 22 at discard."15??? Sometimes, they even learn to use the antibiotics for food.

Gain is a parameter in neural network modeling, which influences the probability that a neuron fires at a given activation level. Single cell recordings in non-human primates have shown that the likelihood of a neuron firing, given a constant sensory input, is enhanced when the stimulus dimension that is preferentially processed by the neuron is attended to.11

Attentional amplification of sensory awareness in any sensory medium is achieved by top-down signals from prefrontal cortex that modulate activity of single neurons in sensory brain areas in the absence of any sensory stimulation and significantly increase baseline activity in the corresponding target region.

increase in serotonin

But weren't we also talking about the white pines? What do they get out of it? This is how the white pines propagate. It is a form of pollination, or rather an innovation on pollination as we usually define it.