The lost language of plants

[SlavaOn]

Yesterday, I pulled from the shelf a book that I read a long time ago: "The lost language of plants" by Stephen Harrod Buhner.
I will quote a little piece from it:

I was now much more interested in how thinking affects behavior so I shifted my major to trans cultural epistemology, the study of how different cultures know. Part of my learning was concerned with the epistemologies of historical and present-day non-industrial cultures. One observation that has particular relevance for this book stood out strongly: Among widely diverse non-industrial cultures the members whose specialty was plant medicines, vegetalistas, described their experiences remarkably similarly irrespective of culture, continent, or time. The vast majority (essentially all instances where I have found first hand accounts) told interviewers that they did not obtain their knowledge of plant medicines from the exercise of reason or through trial and error. They were uniformly consistent in saying that their personal and cultural knowledge of the medicinal actions of plants came from "non ordinary" experiences, specifically: dreams, visions, direct communications from the plant, or sacred beings.

I found this uniformity astonishing. The majority of interviewers were also remarkably uniform, in nearly every case: After being told the source of a practitioner's plant knowledge, they would immediately denigrate it. It would be ascribed to superstition, or ignorance, or un-Christian barbarism. A very few researchers approached their work without prejudice and simply reported verbatim what they were told. I found a single instance of a researcher recognizing a pattern, but he did not pursue the implications, merely noted that it was "amazing."
Nearly all scientists insist that indigenous peoples learned the uses of plants through a lengthy trial-and-error process. There is an immediate problem with this assertion, of course; they were not there to observe it. Their assertion is an assumption, a guess, though so widely repeated it has taken on the mantle of fact…
...
Indigenous people were clear, however, about where their knowledge of plant medicines originated. In the vast preponderance of cases, when they were asked, they insisted that their knowledge of plants came, not from trial and error, but from plants themselves, from visions or dreams or from sacred beings. That their description of the sources of plant knowledge should be so uniform is in itself, as Stevens notes, amazing. The assumption by scientists that all nonindustrial peoples generated these descriptions out of superstition and ignorance is astonishingly shortsighted and, frankly, not very good science. What is especially striking is that the medicinal uses for plants that nonindustrial people were taught during these experiences correspond nearly perfectly to the medicinal actions of the plants that have been identified through science.

Can Cs teach us the lost language of plants? What steps need to be taken in order to start learning it?

SlavaOn

 

[United Gnosis]

As described in your quote, i can imagine how peoples who lived outside of the traumatized psyche of the west and dedicated to living with these plants could attain this direct knowing from their level of being.

I feel it is mostly a matter of presence, self-remembering, if you will. I recon that most practitioners would tell you similarly, but i can only speak for myself; however, i can say from experience that personal practice leads you, as a byproduct, to this kind of intuitional knowing. Mileage may vary ;)

 

[SlavaOn]

Hello United Gnossis.

I am not aware of any modern herbalist or phytotherapy doctor who learned any plant knowledge directly from the plants themselves; or from "non ordinary" experiences. Theirs is a book-based knowledge, medical college professors and practitioners' workshops.

I am curious if these sacred communications were taking place with the spirits of plants themselves or some other entities who possess that knowledge of plants?

SlavaOn

 

[SlavaOn]

Maybe, Masanobu Fukuoka is an exception to the rule?
He did have a "profound spiritual experience"... Quote from Wikipedia:

n 1937 he was hospitalised with pneumonia, and while recovering, he stated that, he had a profound spiritual experience that transformed his world view and led him to doubt the practices of modern "Western" agricultural science.

SlavaOn