This is a wonderful talk that resonates with inner awareness and allows many subtle threads to enter conscious realisation.

I am reminded that when I was around 14 or 15, our biology teacher set us an experiment of talking to plants and to see how this affects their growth.

We used punnets of mustard cress. We placed them in different locations throughout our large laboratory classroom. They were all placed along the worktops by the window wall for equal access to the light source.

We carefully measured their water intake to make sure that it was equal.

To one, we spoke lovingly. To another, we spoke horribly. And, to the 3rd group, the ‘control’ group, we didn’t speak at all.

In our results, those we spoke to well, grew the most; those we spoke to horribly grew the least, and the measurement of the ‘control’ plants was ‘between’ the best and worst. So, in later years when the press was ridiculing Prince Charles for talking to his plants, it never occurred to me to wonder about the sense of his actions. In a quiet way, I knew what I knew, having been involved in the experiment and seen the results for myself.

This has probably been a discreet influence on my attitude to science and the question of an authentic basis for what we think we know. Experience indicates that what tends to fall short are beliefs based on our reaction to the attitudes and opinions of others, rather than what we have wondered about and explored for ourselves. So often, in the absence of our own involvement, ie testing out and seeing what happens, we become caught up in placing intense emphasis on conclusions and interpretations whose nature and implications we actually neither know or understand, and may not actually even care about.

While it is a valuable faculty/function, what we think of as the intellect is often misinformed and dominated, deformed by received opinions, rather than based on the convergence of genuine streams of awareness. Experience indicates that it is the friction of such contra-diction of this quieter knowing/being that gives rise to suffering. Suffering functions as a real time signal indicating that something vital is being misrecognised – ie, our beliefs are out of alignment with the real nature of our being.

It was many years later before I realised that the timing of her setting us the task of the experiment probably followed her reading of The Secret Life of Plants, published at that time (1973).

• This book is referred to as pseudoscience in the AI response to a search; pseudos as in lying! The question of who is lying about what sends our intellect into spirals of confusion when we have blocked ourselves off from our own enquiry. Our inner knowing awaits our attune to it again. It may be quiet or speak loudly, with symptoms and turmoil. Many, if not most of us, currently have some work to do to bring our conscious attitudes closer to resonance with our profound/intimate being/truth. This work is not strenuous, and not only can strain not accomplish it, strain goes in an opposing direction. We only have to begin by giving our consent (as an embodied feeling of being) in a present moment of its calling to us., of easing up on tension and, step by step, transformation begins happening.

The talk in the link above conveys a feeling of the way as well as bringing many relevant ideas into play.