Quotes from Stephen Harrod Buhner

The parts are relied upon to use their own analyses and choices as to how to respond, in essence, giving Gaia a network of trillions upon trillions of neural networks all working in their own sphere to help maintain Gaian homeodynamis. and all utilizing their own inherent genius to do so

By locating our consciousness in only one biological oscillator, the brain, we blinded ourselves to perceptions that have been common to human beings since they emerged from this Earth. In gaining a reductionist understanding of the world, we lost touch with the essential nature of the Earth and ourselves.

Altering sensory gating parameters are most easily accomplished in one of three ways, and we've already talked in some depth about the first one: 1) having a task that demands a greater focus on incoming sensory data flows. The others are: 2) regenerating a state similar to that which occurred during the first few years of life, or 3) by altering the nature of the gating channels themselves by shifting consciousness (which is somewhat different from re-generating developmental stages).

How much of life have I wasted by believing the thing I was taught, that thinking is what makes us better, that the brain is superior to heart. —AUTHOR'S JOURNAL, JUNE 2001

these sensory capacities are deeply interwoven with the complexity that we know of as the world. They are a primary point of interface between me and not me. For the ecological sophistication that we call Earth to exist, those interfaces must, of necessity, be extremely sophisticated as well.

The sensory stimuli we encounter do not, in and of themselves, except under unusual circumstances determine whether or not we pay attention to them; we, ourselves, do. In fact novel stimuli of great intensity (which usually are not gated) will be gated if they do not conform to the nature of expected sensory inputs.

Myra Hird puts it . . . Symbiosis entails the unfathomably messy entanglements that constitute temporal assemblages that sometimes emerge as symbiogenetic singularities.14

Mark Lappe once put it . . . The period once euphemistically called the Age of Miracle Drugs is dead.

Note: If you are going to make your own tincture from cordyceps powder, then use a 50 percent alcohol solution in a 1:5 herb:liquid ratio. Add the cordyceps powder to the water only. Starting with cold water, bring the mixture to a boil, then cover and let steep overnight. Then add the alcohol and let it steep for a few weeks. This will more efficiently extract the polysaccharides from the root. Some

You can use cordyceps or baikal skullcap or rhodiola infusions to stimulate the production of root tissues in plants—including the root brain—sida acuta infusions to fight bacterial infections, isatis infusions to fight viral infections, or even plants high in brassinosteroids to help a plant's immune function.

It is specific for disease conditions accompanied by weakness and sweating

Other uses are: for tonifying the lungs, for shortness of breath, for frequent colds and flu infections; as a diuretic and for reduction of edema; for tonifying the blood and for blood loss, especially postpartum; for diabetes; for promoting the discharge of pus, for chronic ulcerations, including of the stomach, and for sores that have not drained or healed well.

In the treatment of 92 patients suffering ischemic heart disease, astragalus was more successful than nifedipine. Patients were "markedly relived" from angina pectoris. EKG test results improved 82.6 percent.

Gregory Bateson once put it . . . The human being, depersonified in his own talk and thought, may indeed learn more thingish habits of action.16

It wasn't supposed to be this way; when antibiotics were commercially introduced in 1946 they were considered to be miracle drugs and many prominent researchers and physicians loudly proclaimed the end of infectious disease—for all time—was at hand. The trouble is that the lens through which most scientists viewed the world then (as regrettably, many still do) pictured the world as an essentially static background against which human beings acted.

A rich sensory experience occurs during such dreaming but what you were not doing to any great extent was paying attention to the complex visual field that surrounded you as you dreamed. You were, at an unconscious level, restricting the amount of visual sensory information that flowed into your conscious mind.

In a similar way, the focus on the form of an object: which leg is larger on that chair, on that table, on that bed—which leaf shape is more oval among those three different plant species—disrupts subsequent meaning processing.

The various forms that have emerged over the lifetime of Gaia are innovations designed to maintain homeodynamis and to carry out the ecological functions that help it to do so.

Another study, in which participants were asked to determine whether or not a capital letter in a word was a vowel or consonant (jewEl, fAble, oRacle, breaTh) found that it strongly disrupted subsequent semantic processing of unconsciously encountered words. In other words, the ability to determine the meaning in words, at an unconscious level, was inhibited.

As Kiefer et al. note, again in an insult to clear languaging, "The capture of visuo-spatial attention by unconscious stimuli likewise was shown to depend on the match between the stimulus feathers and a fitting top-down search template."17 In other words, some things have to be believed to be seen or, another way of putting it: if you assume something is not there, then, to you, it won't be.

The truth is much different. Bacteria literally analyze the antibiotics that they encounter and generate responses to them. They actually remake their genome in order to alter their physical form. And this solution? It is passed on to their descendants. In essence, this is the passing on of acquired characteristics, something Lamarck insisted was possible and that neo-Darwinians have ridiculed ever since.

In this process, any particular organism that emerges out of the self-organized matrix of the Earth system does so for particular reasons at a particular time. Those reasons will not always exist, nor will that particular species.

Ironically enough, it was Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, who first warned of bacterial resistance. He noted as early as 1929 in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology that numerous bacteria were already resistant to the drug he had discovered and by 1945 he warned in a New York Times interview that improper use of penicillin would inevitably lead to the development of resistant bacteria.

Or as Luther Burbank put it, "It is repetition, repetition, repetition that habituates the skill.