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Show Let's Talk fen iuJ f By Rev. Lee Truman Copley News Service Archie Matson, a Methodist Meth-odist minister, had two flats of plants in his office. Behind his closed office doors, he prayed for one and cursed the other. He measured the amount of water given to each, and he set them side by side in the sun. The flat that he cursed grew faster than the one he was praying for! That so upset Ariche that it caused him to do a great deal of research and writing. It has caused me to gather a great deal of material on this phenomenon since. I have often been in the home of grandmothers who swear that by whispering words of encouragement to their African violets and geraniums they have helped them grow. I have never had the nerve to suggest sug-gest cursing as a possibility, possibili-ty, but I have wondered what the result might be. Dr. Homer Bucher, who is not a minister or a little old grandma, but is a human relations expert, does not admit to talking to plants himself. He earned his doctorate by studying plant response to environment, environ-ment, and his observations have convinced him that while plants do not hear granny's sweet talk, or a minister's prayers or curses, they do get the message, and may do so by reading our minds. It is Bucher's opinion that within the system of plant life there is something some-thing which can only be understood un-derstood as being akin to our feelings and emotions. He says they appreciate being watered, and they worry when some threatening threat-ening force comes near them. Bucher goes so far as to say that plants faint when violence threatens their well-being. He is gathering data to prove they have sympathy emotions when harm comes to other plants or animals which are close to them. His interest was turned from psychology when he tried to test how long it took water poured upon a droopy-leafed philoden-dron philoden-dron to travel from the roots to the leaves. He used a galvinometer, thinking that the increased moisture mois-ture in the leaf would change the electrical resistance re-sistance enough to register on his instrument Bucher was shocked to find an immediate reaction which was very close to that of a person under emotional stimulation. The reaction was so great that he had to switch to a much less sensitive instrument, and he used a voltmeter. He continued the experiment experi-ment by putting a Bunsen burner under a leaf. "At the moment I had the conviction in my mind that I was going to do this, the needle hit the peg," he recalls. "This really shook me up." He says that he has since done this same experiment with countless thousands of plants, and gotten a response re-sponse from his intended harm to the plant. To prove his point, he had JO persons, four of whom I know well, choose lots to see who would attack at-tack one of the four plants in his office. This was done, and the person mangled the plant The following day there was no change in the instrument readings on the three surviving plants when the nine persons reentered re-entered the room, one by one. The needles went off the scale on all the plants when the woman who mangled man-gled the fourth plant came into the room. "These are startling findings," said Dr. Ralph D. Burkland, who has undertaken under-taken to research medically medical-ly the results of some of the more startling discoveries. discov-eries. "It's risky research, and I know this," he said, "but the findings indicate that there may be a primary form of communication which is almost instantaneous instantane-ous among all living things which is outside and beyond be-yond any of the natural laws as we know them, and this very much is worth our looking into." The best thing Dr. Burkland Burk-land told me was: "I am beginning to see a lot of similarities between what I find true in the laboratory laborato-ry and the phenomenon of prayer. When I started this work I was an agnostic and I had not really made the effort it takes to be an atheist. "I frankly see some very high-level spiritual and theological implications in all this. For me, it is a way for scientific exploration of the concept of the soul and seems to indicate a scientific scien-tific justification for the power oi prayer. I still worry about Archie Ar-chie Matson's cursed plants growing so well. Someday when I have more courage and a very empty office, I am going to have a heart-to-heart (expletive (ex-pletive deleted) talk with a contrary cactus. |