The Spiritual Science of Crystal Healing, Chapter 1: My Plant Guru

 

[Note: Text is by Marcel Vogel Licensed by Satya Center LLC unless otherwise noted. Text in Italics is commentary by writer and editor Curtis Lang of Satya Center]

1969-1971: Teachings of My Plant Guru

One day in 1969 while teaching a class on Creativity at IBM, I was given a paper in Argosy Magazine written by Cleve Bakster entitled Do Plants Have Emotions?.[1]

I brought it into class the next day and I said that personally I thought it was a lot of nonsense, but suggested we put it to the test, to see if there was any truth in it. All agreed.

The class built their own experimentation protocol and I built mine. We shared everything, yet were completely diverse in our approaches. In the end the class found nothing of value in the Backster Experiment.

The experiment consisted of taking stainless steel electrodes, attaching them with a conductive paste to the top and bottom of the leaf of a plant. We then applied a 4-volt DC current to the plates. Two wires went to a Wheatstone Bridge, which measured the resistance, and the balance or imbalance between the top and bottom electrode.

The wires from the Wheatstone Bridge travelled to an amplifier and then to a strip chart recorder.

If an electrical imbalance existed between the electrodes, the needle would swing in either a positive or negative direction. What influences the charge balance is the ionic conductivity which takes place in the cellular structure of the leaf.

The equipment produced an energy field that acted on the leaf. The end result of that energy imbalance was a series of vibrations or oscillations visible on a graph.

Nothing happened until the last day, when my intuition guided me to ask Dr. Jan Thomas to come with me into a darkroom where we proceeded to do a set of experiments that changed my life.

Although none of his students succeeded in duplicating the Backster Effect, Vogel “was able to report that he had duplicated certain of Backster’s results,” as explained in the best-selling book The Secret Life of Plants, first published in 1989, “and proceeded to demonstrate how plants anticipate the act of having their leaves torn, react with even greater alarm to the threat of being burnt or uprooted – more so even than if they are actually torn, burnt or otherwise brutalized.”[2]

For the first time I had validation of the fact that when you think a thought, an energy transfer takes place between you and the object or person you are focusing on. That energy transfer was sufficiently powerful to change the electrical balance of the leaf and the plant system I was working on. This took place on December 3, 1969.

Although the class at IBM did not feel these experiments were of real value, I took the equipment home to continue the activity.

A few months later during an experiment, I discovered that when I focused my mind, took a deep breath, energetically drew the image of the plant in my mind’s eye, and then released it with an outgoing breath, a field immediately built up within the plant, and a series of spikes began to appear on the graph similar in appearance to an electro-cardiogram. It had the rhythmic pulsation of a beating heart. I soon found that I could do this at will.

To stop it, I would look at the plant, inhale, and the oscillation would cease. I could do this both inside the room where the plant was located or away from it. It was independent of space.

It is our choice to take the time to build the charge that permits us to function as a fully charged operational human being. This was the discovery I made, the moment of truth, about breath and breath control.

From this experiment I went into Yoga.

I went to school for three years to study the different forms of Yoga and I have been practicing it ever since. When we become a properly charged body, we can create an image of self in space, we can know ourself, but above all we can walk in Light.

Plant Research Unlocks Keys to Conscious Use of Subtle Energy

What a broad leaf plant does is provide an exceedingly sensitive antenna for the vibrations or musical notes we radiate in space.

I spent untold hours practicing breathing in front of a plant.

Moth on Zinnia, Bethabara Community Garden, Bethabara Historical Park,

Winston Salem, North Carolina, photo by Curtis Lang

I learned to measure my breath and observed the increasing oscillation or vibration that took place within my body, until I came to a phase lock, at which time I would go into an altered state of consciousness.

When this takes place, you oscillate at a phase of vibration which transcends the 7 Hertz signal, the earth-plane oscillation. You are free to move into the cosmos.

A 2010 research paper by Min Zhuo and others published in Molecular Brain, suggests that the 7 Hertz signal is implicated in mammalian learning. “Mounting evidence suggests that neural oscillations are related to the learning and consolidation of newly formed memory in the mammalian brain. Four to seven Hertz (4-7 Hz) oscillations in the prefrontal cortex are also postulated to be involved in learning and attention processes,” the authors explain. “There is evidence that these prefrontal 4-7.5 Hz rhythms, which exist in mice, rats, monkeys and humans, are involved in attention and learning processes.”

I also found when in that altered state information became available to me I otherwise could never have known.

Your perspective of earthbound activities and problems changes when you see them in cosmic light rather than individualistic terms, and as the image of a thought begins to form in your mind, time begins.

Time only exists from the moment you start the process of thinking. It is like a stop-watch. There is no time until you press the button. Once you start the clock, you can measure time, but before that, there is no time.

Thought works in exactly the same way.

With thought you can create matter in space with your mind. That matter is a consolidation of cosmic fluids brought together in form that then starts to pulse and oscillate.

You bring life into being with thought, and energy follows thought.

Beyond energy there is the form and the luminescence which each one of these forms produces.

Of course, time does not exist in the higher dimensions, but when we lower it with our intention and build a thought form, we trigger an oscillation in space.

First we occupy space, then we pulse space with a note. These are not audible tones, but are the exact harmonics of the primary vibration that every form has.

For an object to be a solid, it must vibrate, otherwise it would disintegrate.

There is an element of consciousness in every object that has form because a higher consciousness has imputed into that form a pre-form or a mold. Once that happens, matter forms around it.

Electron Microscope Photo of Liquid Crystal by Marcel Vogel

Here Vogel’s vision of reality corresponds to the work of renowned scientist Rupert Sheldrake, who posits the existence of morphic fields, composed of subtle energy, which provide the templates of existence in the material world.

“The term [morphic fields] is more general in its meaning than morphogenetic fields, and includes other kinds of organizing fields in addition to those of morphogenesis; the organizing fields of animal and human behaviour, of social and cultural systems, and of mental activity can all be regarded as morphic fields which contain an inherent memory,” Sheldrake explains.[3]

According to Wikipedia, “Morphic field is a term introduced by Sheldrake. He proposes that there is a field within and around a morphic unit which organizes its characteristic structure and pattern of activity. According to Sheldrake, the morphic field underlies the formation and behaviour of holons and morphic units, and can be set up by the repetition of similar acts or thoughts.”

“The hypothesis is that a particular form belonging to a certain group, which has already established its (collective) morphic field, will tune into that morphic field. The particular form will read the collective information through the process of morphic resonance, using it to guide its own development. This development of the particular form will then provide, again through morphic resonance, a feedback to the morphic field of that group, thus strengthening it with its own experience, resulting in new information being added (i.e. stored in the database). Sheldrake regards the morphic fields as a universal database for both organic (genetic) and abstract (mental) forms.”

Rupert Sheldrake, Tucson 2008, photo by Zereshk, courtesy of Wikimedia

“That a mode of transmission of shared informational patterns and archetypes might exist did gain some tacit acceptance when it was proposed as the theory of the collective unconscious by renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung. According to Sheldrake, the theory of morphic fields might provide an explanation for Jung's concept as well. Also, he agrees that the concept of akashic records, a term from the Vedas representing the library of all the experiences and memories of human minds (souls) through their physical lifetime, can be related to morphic fields, since one's past (an akashic record) is a mental form, consisting of thoughts as simpler mental forms (all processed by the same mind), and a group of similar or related mental forms also have their associated (collective) morphic field. (Sheldrake's view on memory-traces is that they are non-local, and not located in the brain.)”

Wikipedia points out that “The existence of the morphogenetic fields was experimentally confirmed in the year 2011 by Dany Adams, a developmental biologist at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts. It turned out that a morphogenetic field is the common electric field of an organism's DNA molecules.”

It was a plant which first revealed to me the subtle, inner life force energy and power of mind, but it was the pioneering work of George and Marjorie de la Warr that provided me with the tool to examine and unfold an exact and precise knowledge of what this energy is.

The de la Warr’s built a special radionic camera with which they were able to capture thought forms on their camera plates. Thought forms are the construction of a pattern of thought in space. Study of the glass camera plates under a high power microscope, using a dark field ultra pack objective, reveals tracks on the surface of the plate. These are identical to those seen in a cloud chamber which is used to study the high energy particles from a cyclotron or linear accelerator. You can see curved and spinning tracks forming into different types of patterns.

It should be noted that a single camera plate reveals only one narrow segment of the total multi-dimensional energy field that exists in a thought form pattern, but with persistence and further development we were able to achieve exciting results with monumental implications.

We are made to the image and likeness of God. We have a Divine power within us, the power of creation.

To create means to bring matter into being by thought.

You can initiate a pre-form in space. Energy will then consolidate and adapt itself into that pre-form. The energy which we can see with the help of the de la Warr camera is cosmic.

1971 -- Building Thought Forms

On February 26th, 1971 I did an experiment in thought form building with a nuclear physicist, Dr. Warpen, from the University of California at Santa Cruz. He tried for six months to duplicate the Backster Experiment to no avail.

I stood about 5 feet from the plant. After I tuned in to it, I asked him to think about his wife, and as soon as he did, the energy of his thought affected the plant.

He had been standing a good 50 feet from the plant. I had acted as a telepathic medium for him, linking with him, and transferring the charge to the plant by the love I had for it.

We did the Backster Experiment a third time while Dr. Warpen was in a state of self-induced hypnosis, but this time there was no transmission of information. When you are in a hypnotic state, your energy field is locked within you and you do not emit these energy fields.

Another aspect of thought and thinking is that one can move objects with thought.

In the next experiment I used a crescograph, a cantilever beam balance, to measure any movement or growth in the leaf. I looked at the leaf and willed it to move.

Photo of Crescograph by Biswarup Ganguly, from Jagadish Chandra Bose Museum

The leaf moved, it oscillated. When you think, you create a field in space. You create a mass of sufficient force to act on matter, which can be recorded by the object being thought of, or on film.

In a paper titled The Forming of Images in Space by the Brain, the soviet scientist, Dr. G.C.Khokolov, discussed his belief in a multi-dimensional space. Once you get into hyper-space the element of time disappears. You can then construct an image and move that image elsewhere.

Vogel initiated some new plant experiments in the spring of 1971.

“With a philodendron attached to a galvanometer which produced a straight baseline, Vogel stood before the plant, completely relaxed, breathing deeply and almost touching it with outstretched fingers,” recount Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird in their best-selling book The Secret Life of Plants.[4]

Vogel focused on an inner feeling of friendly affection for the plant, and directed that loving feeling toward the plant. Each time he did so, the galvanometer’s pen traced a series of ascending oscillations on Vogel’s chart. Vogel told Tompkins and Bird that at these times he could feel “an outpouring” of energy from the plant in response.

In another experiment, Vogel hooked up two plants at once to his measuring devices, and proceeded to cut a leaf from the first plant. “The second plant responded to the hurt being inflicted on its neighbor, but only when Vogel was paying attention to it!” reported Tompkins and Bird.

During these experiments it became clear to Vogel that in order to successfully communicate energetically with plants, the researcher must be able to enter into a deep meditative state, similar to that experienced by yogis, Buddhist teachers, and others who have had extensive training in quieting and focusing the mind.

Vogel reported that his own methodology required him to dampen his own sensory responses to outside stimulation of all kinds, and only after this trance-like state was achieved could Vogel become aware of the energetic communication with the plants.

These plant experiments increased Vogel’s confidence to the point where he soon appeared on a local TV program in San Francisco to demonstrate human-plant communications.

“The plant, coupled to a pen recorder, gave a live illustration of varying states of Vogel’s mind, running from irritation at an interviewer’s question to quiet tracings established when Vogel was in harmonious intercommunication with the plant,” Tompkins and Bird recount.[5]

“For the producer of ABC’s television program You Asked For It, Vogel also demonstrated the plant’s response to another person’s thoughts, including a sudden release of strong emotion on command, followed by the act of his quieting the plant,” Tompkins and Bird conclude.

Vogel had begun to go public with his findings, and began to generate substantial interest and attention for his work with plants as a result.

Also in 1971, Dr. Weide, a clinical psychologist, started Psychic Research, Inc. As he got deeper into it, he became fearful of psychic phenomena (the forces that the mind can create and exhibit) and he backed out, and one day he just handed the whole organization over to me. Emotionally he could not handle it.

I began working very closely with a lawyer, Leonard Worthington. He is the one who put the corporate papers together.

During the early 1970s, I was working at IBM, working on the plant research, and had Psychic Research, Inc. as a non-profit corporation. At first it was a one man corporation – myself.

But Vogel’s experiments with plants and subtle energy would soon lead him into another avenue of research – the use of quartz crystals in meditation and healing.

This new line of research would eventually establish Vogel as an expert in the use of subtle energy for spiritual purposes of all kinds, and as one of a handful of American spiritual scientists, psychics and healers who established protocols for the use of quartz crystals in healing and meditation that are still in widespread use today.

[Note: Text is by Marcel Vogel Licensed by Satya Center LLC unless otherwise noted. Text in Italics is commentary by writer and editor Curtis Lang of Satya Center]

Chapter Two: Experiments with quartz crystals inspire Vogel's dream vision of a faceted quartz crystal shaped like the Qabbalistic Tree of Life, to be used for healing and meditation.