A Language Older Than Words (41 page)

"After working with plants, bacteria, and eggs, I started to wonder how animals would react. But I couldn't get a cat or dog to sit still long enough to do meaningful monitoring. So I thought I'd try human sperm cells, which are capable of staying alive outside the body for long periods of time, and are certainly easy enough to obtain. I got a sample from a donor, and put it in a test tube with electrodes, then separated the donor from the sperm by several rooms. The donor inhaled amyl nitrate, which dilates blood vessels and is conventionally used to stop a stroke. Just crushing the amyl nitrate caused a big reaction in the sperm, and when the donor inhaled, the sperm went wild.

"So here I am, seeing single-cell organisms on a human level—
sperm—that are responding to the donor's sensations, even when they are no longer in the same room as the donor. There was no way, though, that I could continue that research. It would have been scientifically proper, but politically stupid. The dedicated skeptics would undoubtedly have ridiculed me, asking where my masturbatorium was, and so on.

"Then I met a dental researcher who had perfected a method of gathering white cells from the mouth. This was politically feasible, easy to do, and required no medical supervision. I started doing split-screen videotaping of experiments, with the chart readout superimposed at the bottom of the screen showing the donor's activities. We took the white cell samples, then sent the people home to watch a preselected television program likely to elicit an emotional response—for example, showing a veteran of Pearl Harbor a documentary on Japanese air attacks. We found that cells outside the body still react to the emotions you feel, even though you may be miles away.

"The greatest distance we've tested has been about three hundred miles. Astronaut Brian O'Leary, who wrote
Exploring Inner and Outer Space,
left his white cells here in San Diego, then flew home to Phoenix. On the way, he kept track of events that aggravated him, carefully logging the time of each. The correlation remained, even over that distance."

"The implications of all this ..."

He interrupted, laughing again. He said, "Yes, are staggering. I have file drawers full of high-quality anecdotal data showing time and again how bacteria, plants, and so on are all fantastically in tune with each other. And human cells, too, have this primary perception capability, but somehow it's gotten lost at the conscious level."

I smiled at the confirmation of my own deadening, and, more recently, reawakening. I asked, "How has the scientific community received your work?"

"With the exception of scientists at the margins, like Rupert Sheldrake, it was met first with derision, then hostility, and mostly now with silence.

"At first they called primary perception 'the Backster Effect,' perhaps hoping they could trivialize the observations by naming them after this wild man who claimed to see things missed by mainstream science. The name stuck, but because primary perception can't be readily dismissed, it is no longer a term of contempt."

"What's the primary criticism by mainstream scientists?" "The big problem—and this is a problem as far as consciousness research in general is concerned—is repeatability. The events I've observed have all been spontaneous. They have to be. If you plan them out in advance, you've already changed them. It all boils down to a this: repeatability and spontaneity do not go together, and as long as members of the scientific community overemphasize repeatability in scientific methodology, they're not going to get very far in consciousness research.

"Not only is spontaneity important, but so is intent. You can't pretend. If you say you are going to burn a plant, but don't mean it, nothing will happen. I hear constantly from people in different parts of the country, wanting to know how to cause plant reactions. I tell them, 'Don't do anything special. Go about your work; keep notes so later you can tell what you were doing at specific times, and then compare them to your chart recording. But don't plan anything, or the experiment won't work.' People who do this often get equivalent responses to mine, and often win first prize in science fairs. But when they get to Biology 101, they're told that what they have experienced is not important.

"There have been a few attempts by scientists to replicate my experiments with brine shrimp, but these have all been methodologically inadequate. When they learned they had to automate the experiment, they merely went to the other side of a wall and used closed-circuit television to watch what occurred. Clearly, they weren't removing their consciousness from the experiment." Cleve paused, a rare event, then said, suddenly serious, "It is so very easy to fail at that experiment. And let's be honest: some of the scientists were relieved when they failed, because success would have gone against the body of scientific knowledge."

I said, "For scientists to give up predictability means they have to give up control, which means they have to give up Western culture, which means it's not going to happen until civilization collapses under the weight of its own ecological excesses."

He nodded, I'm not sure whether in agreement or thought, then said, "I have given up trying to fight other scientists on this, because I know that even if the experiment fails they still see things that change their consciousness. People who would not have said anything twenty years ago often say to me, I think I can safely tell you now how you really changed my life with what you were doing back in the early seventies.' These scicentists didn't feel they had the luxury back then to rock the boat; their credibility, and thus their grant requests, would have been affected."

Faced with what Backster was saying, I had several options, presumably the same options with which readers are faced concerning my interactions with coyotes. I could believe he is lying, as is everyone else who has ever made similar observations. I could believe that what he was saying is true, which would validate everything I have experienced but would require that the whole notion of repeatability in the scientific method be reworked, along with preconceived notions of consciousness, communication, perception, and so on. Or I could believe that he's overlooked some strictly mechanistic explanation. I said all this, then mentioned that I'd seen an account of one scientist who insisted there had to be a loose wire in his lie detector.

He responded, "In thirty-one years of research I've found all my loose wires. No, I can't see any mechanistic solution. Some parapsychologists believe I've mastered the art of psychokinesis—that I move the pen with my mind—which would be a pretty good trick in itself. But they overlook the fact that I've automated and randomized many of the experiments to where I'm not even aware of what's going on until later, when I study the resulting charts and videotapes. The conventional explanations have worn pretty thin. One such explanation, proposed in
Harper's,
was static electricity: if you scuffle across the room and touch the plant, you get a response. But of course I seldom touch the plant during periods of observation, and in any case the response would be totally different."

"So, what
is
the signal picked up by the plant?" "I don't know. I don't believe the signal, whatever it is, dissipates over distance, which is what we'd get if we were dealing with electromagnetic phenomenon. I used to hook up a plant, then take a walk with a randomized timer in my pocket. When the timer went off, I'd return home. The plant always responded the moment I turned around, no matter the distance. And the signal from Phoenix was just as strong as if Brian O'Leary were in the next room.

"Also, we've attempted to screen the signal using lead-lined containers, and other materials, but we can't screen it out. This makes me think the signal doesn't actually
go
from here to there, but instead manifests itself in different places. All this, of course, lands us firmly in the territory of the metaphysical, the spiritual. Think about prayer, for instance. If you were to pray to God, and God was hanging out on the far side of the galaxy, and your prayer traveled at the speed of light, your bones would long-since be dust before God could respond. But if God—however you define God—is everywhere, the prayer doesn't have to travel." I thought not so much about God as I did of stars, and the courage they gave me when I was a child, and the thoughts and memories I gave to them. Cleve and I were both silent for a long moment. I looked at the tape recorder on the table between us, and saw the slow rotation of the spools. I thought again about the caring of the stars, and said, "Primary perception suggests a radical redefinition of consciousness."

"You mean it would do away with the notion of consciousness as something on which humans have a monopoly?" He hesitated a moment, then continued, "Western science exaggerates the role of the brain in consciousness. Whole books have been written on the consciousness of the atom. Consciousness might exist on an entirely different level. Some very good research has been done on remote viewing, that is, describing conditions at a distant location. More good research has been done on survival after bodily death. All of it points toward the notion that consciousness need not specifically be linked with gray matter. That is another straitjacket we need to rid ourselves of."

I thought of another story that Jeannette once told me. She had been interviewing a shaman from an indigenous group in the north of Russia. He told her that the year before the caribou had been very late. Hunting parties returned with no meat. The shaman had gone into a trance, and on coming out had told the hunters where to go. They went to the indicated valley, and found the caribou. Jeannette asked him, through a translator, "How did you know where they were?" He held his hands open in front of him, and said, "How do you know where your fingers are?"

Cleve continued, "The brain may have some things to do with memory, but a strong case can be made that much memory is not stored there."

I thought of my difficulty sleeping, then thought also of high jumping. I said, "The whole point of training in athletics seems to be to build memories in the muscles." He nodded, and I pushed the questioning about consciousness further, asking whether he has worked with materials that would normally be considered inanimate.

He answered, "I've shredded some things and suspended them in agar. I get electric signals, but not necessarily relating to anything going on in the environment. It's too crude an electroding pattern for me to decipher. But I do suspect that consciousness goes much much further.

"In 1987 I participated in a University of Missouri program that included a talk by Dr. Sidney Fox, then connected with the Institute for Molecular and Cellular Evolution at the University of Miami. Fox had recorded electric signals from proteinlike material that showed properties strikingly similar to those of living cells. The simplicity of the material he used and the self-organizing capability it displayed suggest to me that biocommunication was present at the earliest states in the evolution of life on this planet. Of course the Gaia hypothesis—the idea that the earth is a great big working organism, with a lot of corrections built in—fits in nicely with this. I don't think it would be a stretch to take the hypothesis further and presume that the planet itself is intelligent."

I asked how his work has been received in other parts of the world.

"The Russians and other eastern Europeans have always been very interested. And whenever I encounter Indian scientists— Buddhist or Hindu—and we talk about what I do, instead of giving me a bunch of grief they say, 'What took you so long?' My work dovetails very well with many of the concepts embraced by Hinduism and Buddhism."

"What
is
taking us so long?"

"The fear is that, if what I am observing is accurate, many of the theories on which we've built our lives need complete reworking. I've known biologists to say, 'If Backster is right, we're in trouble.' It takes a certain kind of character and personality to even attempt such a questioning of fundamental assumptions. The Western scientific community, and actually all of us, are in a difficult spot, because in order to maintain our current mode of being, we must ignore a tremendous amount of information. And more information is being gathered all the time. For instance, have you heard of Rupert Sheldrake s work with dogs? He puts a time-recording camera on both the dog at home and the human companion at work. He has discovered that even if people come home from work at a different time each day, at the moment the person leaves work, the dog at home heads for the door.

“Even mainstream scientists are stumbling all over this biocommunication phenomenon. It seems impossible, given the sophistication of modern instrumentation, for us to keep missing this fundamental attunement of living things. Only for so long are we going to be able to pretend it's the result of 'loose wires.' We cannot forever deny that which is so clearly there."

It was good to receive this validation, but I didn't want to trust Backster: he could be lying, or he could be crazy. Just because the story hangs together doesn't mean it accurately represents reality.

We went to dinner, and then I took a long walk. I returned late, and Cleve set me up on pads in the basement. I slept fitfully: the room was too large, too unfamiliar, and with too many corners and too many doors. At last I dragged my sleeping bag into a small room off to the side, barricaded one door with a chair and the other with my feet, and began to doze.

He awakened me early, and we returned to the lab. I wanted to see "the Backster Effect" for myself. He hooked up a plant, and I watched the paper roll out of the recorder. I couldn't correlate the movement of the pen with anything I was feeling, or with the conversation. One of his cats began to play with the plant. The oscillations of the pen
seemed
to increase in magnitude, but I couldn't be sure. Halfheartedly, I suggested burning the plant. No response from the plant. Cleve responded, "I don't think you really want to, and besides, I wouldn't let you."