Giving Plants Their Due
For a long time in western society, animals were regarded by many people as automatons with little or no ability to feel, think, decide, or be self aware. Therefore, it was assumed you could use them in any way you wished.
Fortunately, that idea has changed enormously. What many scientific researchers used to regard as anthropomorphic (attributing human traits to other species) has been shown to really exist as natural characteristic of animals. Many traits that used to be thought as unique to humans are now seen as present and expressed uniquely in non-human animals. (See the Animal Communication Mastery Series recording, Animal Intelligence and Awareness.)
Plants have been denigrated in the same way as non-feeling, unconscious objects.
It is now more extensively acknowledged that plants, too, are conscious, feeling, and thinking, like humans, but expressed uniquely in their different forms. It’s taking humans awhile to be aware of plant sentience and intelligence, just as it did with animals. However, there are hopeful signs of humans evolving awareness of all beings’ sensitivity and their connection to all life.
I was delighted to read a profound article on the subject by Stephen Harrod Buhner,
Plant Consciousness: The Fascinating Evidence Showing Plants Have Human Level Intelligence, Feelings, Pain and More. Here are a few points he made.
Research into plant perception is showing that plants have feelings, they are sentient, they communicate with each other, feel pain and they can plan into the future.
The Plant Brain
Plants are highly conscious, intelligent and they have a brain. It’s just that no one ever looked in the right place to find it. Depth analysis of plant consciousness is finding that their brain capacity is much larger than previously supposed, that their neural systems are highly developed. Plants are highly intelligent, feeling beings—perhaps as much or even more so than humans in some instances.
Plants possess a highly sophisticated neural system and while it does not look like our “brain,” it really is a brain, not all that different from our own. They possess a highly developed, conscious root brain that works much as ours does to analyze incoming data and generate sophisticated responses. The plant neural net, or brain, is highly plastic when compared to ours.
For scientific detail on how the plant brain is set up and how it works, please see the article.
Plants and Perception
Plants are dynamic and highly sensitive organisms, actively and competitively foraging for limited resources both above and below ground, They also accurately compute their circumstances, use sophisticated cost-benefit analysis, and take defined actions to mitigate and control environmental conditions.
Plants are as intelligent and sophisticated in behavior as animals but their potential has been masked because it operates on time scales many orders of magnitude longer than that operation in animals. Plants have developed a very robust communication, signaling and information-processing apparatus. Besides abundant interactions with the environment, plants communicate and interact with other living systems such as other plants, fungi, nematodes, bacteria, viruses, insects, and animals.
When you look at the interconnected network of plant roots and micorrhizal mycelia in any discrete ecosystem, you are looking at a neural network much larger than any individual human has ever possessed. While humans and many other animals have a specific organ, the brain, which houses its neuronal tree, plants use the soil as the stratum for the neural net; they have no need for a specific organ to house their neuronal system. The numerous root apices act as one whole, synchronized, self-organized system, much as the neurons in our brains do. Our brain matter is, in fact, merely the soil that contains the neural net we use to process and store information. Plants consciously use the soil itself to house their neuronal nets. This allows the root system to continue to expand outward, adding new neural extensions for as long as the plant grows.
In addition, the leaf canopy also acts as a synchronized, self-organized perceptual organ, which is highly attuned to electromagnetic fields. It can be viewed, in fact, as a crucial subcortical portion of the plant brain.
“Smart, intelligent plants can memorize stressful environmental experiences and can call upon this information to take decisions about their future activities.” That is, plants consciously plan ahead.
Plant Social Communication
Roots of plants are exquisitely conscious and aware of self and not-self and engage in sophisticated interactions with a wide range of living organisms. The plant roots enter into symbiotic relationships with bacteria, fungi, and communicate with other plants.
If plants in the system detect that another plant in the mycelial network is ill, unique compounds are intelligently generated by the plants most able to do so and sent through the mycelial network to where they are needed. Medicinal compounds in plants are consciously used to heal the individual plant, other plants in the network, and the insects and other animals that make that area home.
Communicating with Plants
Some vegetarians sigh with relief that eating plants is okay because plants aren’t conscious and don’t have feelings like animals do. Of course, this is an incorrect assumption.
What is needed is the awareness and acceptance that death is a part of life and eating. Even if you stopped eating animals and plants and became a breatharian, you would still be inhaling and absorbing living organisms and killing microbes and other life forms in your own bodies. The energetic exchange among bodies and recycling of forms to help other forms is constant.
We can respect, treat well, and be grateful for the life we partake of when we eat. It is also helpful to get the viewpoints of those whose bodies we eat, how they wish to be treated, and their wisdom about the cycle of life.
Animal communication principles and practices apply to plants as well. Direct any questions you have about eating them to the plants themselves. They are all capable of telepathic communication and so are you.
You are invited to read about my experience of plants as individual beings who are also united energetically and radiate love to help us, including a section on how to connect with them. 
