Stephan: If you read SR regularly you will remember earlier stories I have published about the consciousness of bees, birds, sea creatures, and animals. This sort of story gets lost in the news because these reports are rarely placed in their proper context. If they were perhaps people would recognize how important and powerful such research findings are. Why do I say this? Because these stories collectively are telling us we need to radically and fundamentally change our view of reality. All of this research is shows us we live in a matrix of consciousness, and that all life is interconnected and interdependent. Once one's mind opens to that view it becomes clear why new technologies must be developed that don't pollute, that cutting down the Amazon forest has implications that affect the wellbeing of every creature on earth, including ourselves, and that all social policies must be designed with this matrix in mind.
Brain Shaped Bonsai Tree Credit: Getty / Viaframe
Americans like to mow their lawns, but blades of grass aren’t supposed to all have the same length. Left un-sheared, an all-natural lawn contains grasses of wildly varying heights, more akin to an unruly, uncombed head of hair right after a long night’s sleep. A lawn is not a single organism, but a large community of plants that have individual heights; being mowed is not the natural state for a blade of grass.
This raises a disturbing question: When a human mows a lawn, is that the equivalent of mass torture to the grass — assuming the grass can “feel” or “think” the way we can? The proposition is not as outlandish as it might seem. Recent research suggests that plants are far from the stationary automatons that most of us think of them as. And though they don’t have brains in the same way most animals do, plants seem to possess a different set of evolutionary […]
