title: The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature
author:  Stephen Harrod Buhner 
description: Citing Goethe, Thoreau and other opponents of overweening rationalism, Buhner (<i>Sacred Plant Medicine</i>), a researcher for the Foundation for Gaian Studies, criticizes the Western "verbal/intellectual/analytical" "mode of cognition" that has suppressed the "holistic/intuitive/depth" cognition of "ancient and indigenous peoples." The antidote to our "linear" scientific mindset, he contends, is the cultivation of direct sensory perceptions through rapt observation of, and psychic communion with, plants until "the student and the plant interweave...[,] their two life fields entrained." Such emotional and spiritual connections to nature are feasible because, according to Buhner's discordantly scientistic theory of all-penetrating cardiac electromagnetic fields, the heart is our main organ of perception and communication. These methods also apply to the "depth diagnosis" of human ailments through direct perception of patients ("Her chest caught my attention, standing forth of its own accord. Beckoning," he writes of a woman with asthma), which he uses in his healing practice. Buhner's romantic-transcendentalist critique of intellect often lapses into anti-intellectualism ("Keep your botany out of this!... Do not use big, scientific words!") and is undermined by his own murky resort to big, scientific words like "molecular self-organization" and "stochastic resonance." He does produce some evocative passages about real plants, but these are often buried under the loam of a New Age mysticism that only the already convinced will appreciate. <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: Titlepage
  p i
  A Translation of St. Thomas' Commentary
  'On Memory and Recollection'
  by
  John Burchill, O.P.
  A DISSERTATION
  Submitted in Partial Fulﬁllment of the
  Requirements for the Degree of
  Master of Arts
  St. Stephen's Priory
  The Dominican House of Philosophy
  Dover, Massachusetts
  Lesson 1
  Lesson 2
  Lesson 3
  Lesson 4
  Lesson 5
  Lesson 6
  Lesson 7
  Lesson 8
  Lesson One
  p 1
  LESSON ONE
  298. As the Philosopher says in the seventh book On the Histories of Animals, nature proceeds little by 
  little from the inanimate to the animate, so that the genus of inanimate things is found prior to the genus of 
  plants. When the genus of plants is compared to other bodies, it seems to be animate, but compared to the 
  genus of animals, inanimate. (Nature) similarly proceeds from plants to animals in a certain continuous 
  order; for certain immobile animals, which cling to the earth, appear to differ little from plants. Likewise in 
  the progression from animals to man, there are found certain animals in which 