The Intelligence of the Heart in Direct Perception of Nature

[JGeropoulas]

I just came across this book while purchasing the Gaber Mate book (When The Body Says No). Apparently it's a 2004 follow-up to the author's 2002 book (discussed in another post here http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,31303.msg414382.html#msg414382).

I'm intrigued and look forward to reading his insights into how ancient people came to know about the chemical effects of various plants. Here's the blurb from Amazon:

The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature
by Stephen Harrod Buhner

All ancient and indigenous peoples insisted their knowledge of plant medicines came from the plants themselves -- not through trial-and-error experimentation as is typically assumed. Less well known is that many Western peoples made this same assertion. There are, in fact, two modes of cognition available to all human beings: the brain-based linear and the heart-based holistic. The heart-centered mode of perception can be exceptionally accurate and detailed in its information gathering capacities if, as indigenous and ancient peoples asserted, the heart’s ability as an organ of perception is developed.

In Part I Buhner focuses on the brain’s linear mode, where he writes of complex discoveries in neuroscience and neurocardiology with clarity and coherence. In Part II, he explores the heart’s holistic mode of perception in great detail through the work of numerous remarkable people, including Henry David Thoreau, Luther Burbank (who cultivated the majority of food plants we now take for granted) and the great German poet and scientist Goethe (who studied the metamorphosis of plants). Buhner explores the commonalities among these individuals in their approach to learning from the plant world and outlines the specific steps involved.

Readers will gain the tools necessary to gather information directly from the heart of Nature, to directly learn the medicinal uses of plants, to engage in diagnosis of disease, and to understand the soul-making process that such deep connection with the world engenders.

The preface to this book is a great quote from Luther Burbank:

I have long seen that each grain of knowledge I acquired, going to school to school in Nature was added to each other grain I possessed, that these grains grew into foundation stone; that the stones accumulated until I had a substructure, and on that substructure I could build me a house. And I have seen, too, that there are enough buildings in Nature’s system of knowledge to make a great city of wisdom.

I will never see that city completed; no man will. At best he may be able to construct during his lifetime one or two buildings, and perhaps to catch a vision of one or two streets and squares and parks and precincts of the whole. But the sublimity of the city—its endless boulevards, its imposing monuments, its transcendent capitol, its towering edifices, its vistas its sweeping panoramas--these we can only imagine, for the view we get of the structures of knowledge we ourselves are able to build up, grain by grain, rock by rock, tier by tier, story by story, through diligence and hard work, into one or two of the buildings we know are all there somewhere, to be builded.

When I think of this, I wonder why some men are content to erect nothing more than rude huts of knowledge, a little cabin of selfish learning, enough to house them while they amass money or gain power or win fame—and will not even try to raise some nobler structure of the wisdom Nature offers so freely and generously, and that any who come to her may have for the asking!

-- Luther Burbank

“Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful;
they are sunshine, food and medicine to the mind.”
-- Luther Burbank​

 

[Mr. Premise]

Buhner's pretty good. I haven't read that book but I've been meaning to. I've read other stuff by him. He's not just new age, he has good grounding in science.

 

[The Mechanic]

Thanks JGeropoulas, that book sounds really interesting. It's always been a mystery to me how people in the past found out which plants to eat and which not to eat. I always assumed that in archaic times people had some knowledge already that we now have lost, though where that knowledge came from I couldn't figure out. The trial and error method seemed to me to be implausible, if only for the fact that it's quite risky and must have caused a lot of illness and even death in the process. I don't think people would be really up to that, especially when there's plenty of animals to eat.

 

[Ollie]

Buhner's pretty good. I haven't read that book but I've been meaning to. I've read other stuff by him. He's not just new age, he has good grounding in science.

Agreed, I've just finished reading 'The Lost Language of Plants' (The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines to Life on Earth) by Buhner. Excellent