My friend Debra believes fervently in the power of thoughts. When she wants something, she fixes its image in her mind, nourishes the thought daily with expectation and gratitude. Then she waits. Invariably, whether it takes 2 days, 2 months or 2 years, she gets what she desires. She has shown repeatedly that there is power in thoughts.

What she has fixed in her mind invariably appearsin one form or anothera mantel clock that is a perfect replica of one she saw in a magazine, a parking spot that miraculously opens up in a blizzard, the ideal companion for a lonely, divorced friend, a perfect location for her husbands new business. Her life is filled with the blessings of a pure and gentle heart, one that knows how to ask and wait for it to be given.

The more I am in touch with her, the less surprised I am about her clear and prescient way of receiving gifts from the universe. After all, we have seen a pronounced paradigm shift in the last 25 years, a shift in the way we perceive the world and our role within it. We now recognize that there is not only power in our thoughts, but power in the thoughts of the natural kingdom. As humans, we have arrogantly secluded ourselves from the plant, animal and mineral worlds, thinking that we have been the only species privileged with thought and power.

Not so any more, according to two books Masaro Emotos The Hidden Messages of Water(2004): and Cleve Backsters Primary Perception: Biocommunication with Plants, Living Foods and Human Cell( 2003)-- both released within the last 3 years, in tune with a growing recognition that we are no longer the only sentient species in the universe. These books introduce us not only the secret life of water, but the secret thoughts of plants.

Masaru Emoto, a renowned Japanese researcher and independent thinker, shocked and inspired the world with his high-speed photographs of water structure shot at the moment of freezing. What these photographs showed was that water responded directly to human thoughts, words and even music. Crystals formed in frozen water changed their formation and behavior in response to specific thoughts or words directed at them. Water blessed with benevolence and love, for example, displayed brilliant and symmetrical patterns. Water, exposed to negative thoughts and words, assumed asymmetrical, incomplete and despondent shapes.

Emoto has come to see that water is not an inanimate substance; it is able to copy and memorize information. Memory is alive and pulsing though the entire universe; the rock in our garden is not just a rock; it carries layers of memories striated like a cartilege beneath its surfaceall the more reason for us to give it reverence. Our own memories are carried in our cells; these memories are formed by the words we speak and the thought we entertain in our minds. Emoto says, In Japan, it is said that words of the soul reside in a spirit called...the spirit of words and the act of speaking words has the power to change the world.

If water can respond to human thoughts, so can plants, claims Cleve Backster in his book. Considered a leading authority in polygraph and lie detection, Backster attached electrodes from his polygraph machine to a plant stalk in order to measure the time needed for water to travel up the plant to reach the leaves. In the process of this experiment, he discovered that the plant could respond to human thought; a thought of burning the leaves of the plant registered wild and erratic movement in the polygraph chart. This was the beginning of his lifelong interest in understanding the cellular communication process, what he calls Primary Perception, the ability of plant, animal and human cells to perceive and respond at both local and nonlocal levels.

Devising further experiments, he discovered that cellular memory and communication can transcend both space and time and can be measured: plants reacted to the boiling of brine shrimp in water; yogurt reacted to the death of bacteria even when these experiments were carried out miles apart. In an interview, Backster recounted a visit from a botanist to his laboratory that brought about a strange response from his plants: the graphs showed a wandering flatline that indicated the plants were in a state of shock. Prompted by their reaction, he asked his guest if she had done anything to hurt the plants she worked with. Her response was comically in line: Hurt them? My dear, I roast them to get their dry weight. Over 40 years of research has bolstered his observation: that plant, animal, even bacteria cells are sentient organisms that responded to thought or intention, engaged in a primary perception that we, of the modern, human world, seem to have forgotten.

In summary, let me quote not from Sufi mystics or poets, but from one of the leading scientists and thinker of our timesphysicist David Bohm whose book Wholeness and the Implicate Order(1980) is a major catalyst of our paradigm shift. Bohm speaks of two orders in the universethe explicate or unfolded order of ordinary perception and the implicate or enfolded order of extraordinary perception. This is what he says: In the implicate order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order.

Weve had it skewered all along. We think that what we see with our physical eyes is the whole truth. But this ordinary perception of space and time is only a derivative of the extraordinary and primary perception which we have lostthe power of thought, but which we can retrieve with a shift in our thinking and attitudes as my friend Debra has done.

Copyright 2006 Mary Desaulniers