The Advent Of Primary Perception
Interview With Cleve Backster


Cleve Backster: The difference between a green thumb and a brown thumb, is when a person accepts that they are in touch with a living thing, and that it is in touch with you. They develop what some call a green thumb which refers to someone who can commune with plants, and help them grow better. If plants are considered mere decorations, you’ll probably have a brown thumb and won’t have as much success.

Franci Prowse: I live in a valley where apples grow, and in 1984 there came a couple named Campbell from Findhorn, Scotland, who gave a talk on how to get the most out of our apple trees. It was amusing to witness all these retired apple growers learning songs to sing to their trees. They thought they were going to learn about some special fertilizer or other techniques involving physical care. Instead, they were praying to their trees’ spirits, and humming simple words. We had a bumper crop that year, and it has never happened since, perhaps because the singing and praying was mostly forgotten.

Cleve: I visited Findhorn in their early days.[6] There was an elderly man named “Roc” Crombie, who could see auras of plants. At Findhorn, they believed, among other things, that embracing trees and speaking lovingly to plants would accelerate their growth. If there was a swarm of bees, they’d talk to the bees, encourage them to continue landing on the flowers, as humans were no threat to them. They simply treated Nature with a lot of respect. Roc was interested in my work. We were in different arenas, but touching on similar things.

Franci: That reminds me, people have heard a lot about the positive healing aspects of prayer on plants and people, so they can handle that idea, even if they don’t practice it. I wonder about the negative aspect? Have you ever seen anyone kill a plant with their thoughts?

Cleve: They haven’t tried to kill the plants with thought in my experience. But in the book, The Power of Prayer in Plants, by Franklin Loehr, what he did was related. He ended up actually showing this work on the program, “The Green Machine,” a Nova show with a segment on my work. The only thing that made mine seem a bit less far-out was his segment, which followed last. He was working with bean sprouts and they had hundreds of people giving attention to them, one group giving praise and the other giving threats, pictures of drought, etc. The growth rate was actually amazing. The praised plants were 3 or 4 times the size of the others. So they had him block the seeds and sprouts in an aquarium, as part of the experiment, but it made no difference.

Franci: I’d love to see that show! Was that the show where they deleted a very important part of your work?

Cleve: The part that was deleted in the final editing was the nutrient feeding of yogurt. When some of my work was included in the popular scientific “Nova” series, the episode called “the Green Machine,” we were demonstrating biocommunication with some friendly bacteria in yogurt. We had two samples of yogurt, and would feed some nutrient to one sample. The other electroded sample, which was not being fed, would show excitation as if it were saying, “where’s mine?” A biology professor, Dr. Charles Brandt, who was a professor at San Diego State, actually demonstrated this interaction on camera during two separate occasions. He had just replicated the yogurt feeding two evenings before the show. That’s where you electrode sample one, then you have another sample two from the same source. You are feeding some sweet nutrient to the sample two, and there is a reaction with the electroded one. He was the kind of person who already had tenure, and he thought there was an awful lot more to science than what seemed to appear on the surface. So he was brave about the thing. He would talk to the bacteria in the yogurt and say, “Okay, you guys, I’m going to give you something nice to eat! You hungry?” And the electroded one would react with enthusiasm. He did this three times in a row, and twice on camera. When they filmed the show, they made me leave the room, because they thought I would use psychokenesis on the yogurt, to make the pens move. I was told afterwards that he had done this twice on film, which is really great coverage. All the cameras were right there, recording his communication with the bacteria, correlating perfectly with the feeding. When that got over to England for the editing, I think that was just a little too far out for them. Whether it was getting the professors and the kooks mixed up, I don’t know. The idea was I’m the far-out one, and they are supposed to be the academic body of knowledge.

Franci: That’s amusing! So, on the same show, they had the segment on Franklin Loehr and his prayer work demonstrating the superior growth rate of seedlings that were prayed over. But they had nothing on the effects of deadly thoughts?

Cleve: Being a minister, he likely didn’t want to get into the negative side.

Franci: I think it is important to realize that both are equally possible. Energy follows thought, and on the wavelength it goes out.

Cleve: It’s that “Black Magic” kind of thing.

Franci: It’s a favorite theme nowadays: Villains are often dark psychics, masters of mind control, or modern versions of the black magicians of old, often a religious fanatic or cult figure. Modern heroes are allowed to utilize intuitive leaps, as if they have divine guidance.

Cleve: Once you acknowledge that the technique exists, that it’s possible, then you have to realize that everything that is used for good can also be used in the opposite direction. The Soviet Communists ultimately revealed that they were using methods of brainwashing. With their process, they would hammer away at someone and tell them the same thing so much, that eventually they’d follow the party line.

Franci: And the Maoists followed suit in China, screaming over the loudspeakers. But that was done face to face, through the media, and with voice contact. What if they were miles away and doing it telepathically? Forced programming, hypnotic suggestion through telepathy? I heard of that being practiced in a now defunct ashram to bring in moneyed disciples.

Cleve: Here you are getting into the basic use of Voodoo. I immediately saw, way, way back, what this connection was, so I went down to Haiti. I wanted to study what they were doing, but the person I went with was one of the individuals who tried to corner me for a product, even though I told him ahead of time that I didn’t think there would be anything marketable. I knew this was about consciousness and you can’t sell that, so, one early experience of that was I was given a grant anyway, with the assurance that any product I came up with within one year would be his to develop. So I said, “I wouldn’t mind taking a trip to Haiti.” So he paid for the trip and went along. He was a real jerk and would throw money around so they could see the kind of person they were dealing with. They will put on any kind of show you want. So they put on a voodoo thing for him, and he’d act like an ass, go up to the altar with the bottles on it, and drink out of them. Absolutely ridiculous! It wasn’t until the end of the week that I got through to someone in Haiti who showed me how it was.

Franci: I met a woman from Haiti who was utterly beautiful, and in the short time she lived in the neighborhood, she had had every man, married or not, that she crooked her finger at. I had to respect her artfulness, even though I didn’t respect what she did. I heard one guy say he had no memory of ever getting to her house, but woke up there. Incredible sex magic.

Cleve: Yes, the thing that interested me was this unseen communication, that it could be recorded under certain circumstances. I was almost in shock by the idea that this could be happening all the time. I could see how that could easily compete with our normal sense of truth. It wasn’t just the power of suggestion like a lot of people said, “Well, you got to know they’re doing it to you.” Well, I don’t think you do.

Franci: A friend of mine visited Haiti and encountered a large pig that seemed to be possessed by a human spirit because it talked to him. I guess that’s an everyday occurrence there.

Cleve: Everyone there, especially those in business, had their voodoo man working for them, to counteract the witching of the other guy’s. It was considered normal practice. But I really enjoyed visiting Brazil. It’s very different from the rest of the South American states.

Franci: Are they into plant magic down there?

Cleve: They are into everything down there. I’ve been on a few lecture tours in Brazil. I went to what was supposedly a conference on parapsychology. They had me scheduled to lecture, so my interpreter asked if there was anything I’d like to see in Sao Paolo, and in parts of Rio. I said, “I want to go where they don’t want me to go. What have you got going on as far as the kind of things we don’t see in the states, Umbanda, the kind of thing that involves these energies?” So she took me to an Umbanda center on the edge of town. These people ran an orphanage for about two hundred children. They were very spiritually oriented. The services were on a dirt floor even though it was inside, and there were lots of drums and so forth. I had a chance to talk to the leaders there, through the interpreter. They were into Eastern philosophy and everything else. They tuned it down to the level of the people they were working with, to make it work. You know, the cigar smoke, prayers and blowing smoke over the patient, etc. The next time I went down, they gave me a medal from their center for my plant work. The Brazilians are really into this stuff. They wanted to adopt me! They liked finding someone who was from a scientific background who could relate to what they were into.

Franci: I guess the missionaries had their work cut out for them.

Cleve: The Portuguese Catholics didn’t pay as much attention when the generations grew up in Brazil. They let them get away with it. Not like the Spanish Catholics right across in Argentina and the other countries. Very severe! They would stomp it into the ground, as soon as anybody tried to do any of this stuff. In Brazil, they are all into this stuff. It’s a great place.

Franci: So in spite of all the zeal of devout Catholicism and its take-over of South America, the aboriginal beliefs managed to survive and evolve along with the wonderful music. Somehow that does not surprise me.

Cleve: I also visited the slums in Brazil. This woman friend had done some charity work for them, so I had an opportunity to visit where the very poor lived down below, right next to the very rich up on the hill. What kicked this off is the idea of what the implications are, the negative and positive use of this knowledge.

Franci: Sort of, which level do you serve with your knowledge, love or fear? So, in retrospect of your travels, did you find what you were looking for?

Cleve: That and a lot more. What I’m looking for now, is a way for these people to see what I’ve been seeing, and to warn them in advance, not to get all demoralized if they can’t get repeatability in a scientific experiment. So I am trying to give them an opportunity to observe these things happening.