excerpt from The Secret Life of Plants
Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 9:18 pm
n Japan a soft-spoken doctor of philosophy and successful electronics engineer from Kamakura, a charmingly gardened retreat not far from Yokohama harbor, has developed a similar lie detector into a device with the most fabulous results yet achieved in the plant kingdom. A regular consultant on lie detection for the Japanese police, Dr. Ken Hashimoto read about Backster's laboratory experiments and decided to wire one of the family cactuses to an ordinary polygraph by means of acupuncture needles.
His intent was more revolutionary than Backster's, Sauvin's or Byrd's. He hoped to enter into actual conversation with a plant; to do so he counted on an improvement he had made in the Japanese procedure for lie detection. To simplify and make less expensive the process of police interrogation, Dr. Hashimoto developed a system, similar to Dektor's, whereby nothing more than a cassette tape is needed to record the reactions of a suspect. Electronically transposing the modulations of the suspect's voice, Hashimoto was able to produce on a paper a running graph reliable enough to pass muster in a Japanese law court.
It now dawned on Hashimoto that by reversing the system he might be able to transform the tracings from a graph into modulated sounds, giving voice to a plant. His first experiments with a cactus similar to the giant saguaro of California and the Arizona desert, but much smaller, were a failure. Loath to conclude that either Backster's reports or his own equipment was defective, Hashimoto decided that it might be he who was having trouble communicating with the plant, despite the fact that he is one of Japan's leading researchers into psychic phenomena.
His wife, on the other hand, who loves plants and is renowned for her "green thumb", soon got sensational results. As Mrs. Hashimoto assured the plant that she loved it, there was an instant response from the cactus. Transformed and amplified by Dr. Hashimoto's electronic equipment, the sound produced by the plant was like the high-pitched hum of very-high-voltage wires heard from a distance, except that it was more like a song, the rhythm and tone being varied and pleasant, at times even warm and almost jolly.
John Francis Dougherty, a young American from Marina Del Rey, California, who witnessed one of these conversations, says it sounded as if Mrs. Hashimoto, speaking in modulated Japanese, was being answered by the plant in modulated "cactese". Dougherty further reports that the Hashimotos became so intimate with their plant that they were soon able to teach it to count and add up to twenty. In answer to a query as to how much two and two make, the plant would respond with sounds which, when transcribed back into inked tracings, produced four distinct and conjoined peaks.
Dr. Hashimoto, who got his doctorate from Tokyo University, and is chief of the Hashimoto Electronics Research Center, as well as managing director and chief of research for the Fuji Electronic Industries - which produce the huge animated electrical signs that illumine Tokyo - has since demonstrated the adding capacities of his cactus to audiences all over Japan.
Asked to explain the phenomenon of his talking and adding cactus, Dr. Hashimoto, who is also, surprisingly, one of Japan's best-selling authors - his Introduction to ESP is in its sixtieth printing and his Mystery of the Fourth Dimensional World is in its eightieth - answered of present-day physics. He believes there is a world beyond the present three-dimensional world defined by physics, that this three-dimensional world is merely a shadow of a fourth-dimensional, nonmaterial world. He further believes that this fourth-dimensional world controls the three-dimensional material world through what he calls "mind concentration" or what others call psychokinesis or mind-over-matter.
His intent was more revolutionary than Backster's, Sauvin's or Byrd's. He hoped to enter into actual conversation with a plant; to do so he counted on an improvement he had made in the Japanese procedure for lie detection. To simplify and make less expensive the process of police interrogation, Dr. Hashimoto developed a system, similar to Dektor's, whereby nothing more than a cassette tape is needed to record the reactions of a suspect. Electronically transposing the modulations of the suspect's voice, Hashimoto was able to produce on a paper a running graph reliable enough to pass muster in a Japanese law court.
It now dawned on Hashimoto that by reversing the system he might be able to transform the tracings from a graph into modulated sounds, giving voice to a plant. His first experiments with a cactus similar to the giant saguaro of California and the Arizona desert, but much smaller, were a failure. Loath to conclude that either Backster's reports or his own equipment was defective, Hashimoto decided that it might be he who was having trouble communicating with the plant, despite the fact that he is one of Japan's leading researchers into psychic phenomena.
His wife, on the other hand, who loves plants and is renowned for her "green thumb", soon got sensational results. As Mrs. Hashimoto assured the plant that she loved it, there was an instant response from the cactus. Transformed and amplified by Dr. Hashimoto's electronic equipment, the sound produced by the plant was like the high-pitched hum of very-high-voltage wires heard from a distance, except that it was more like a song, the rhythm and tone being varied and pleasant, at times even warm and almost jolly.
John Francis Dougherty, a young American from Marina Del Rey, California, who witnessed one of these conversations, says it sounded as if Mrs. Hashimoto, speaking in modulated Japanese, was being answered by the plant in modulated "cactese". Dougherty further reports that the Hashimotos became so intimate with their plant that they were soon able to teach it to count and add up to twenty. In answer to a query as to how much two and two make, the plant would respond with sounds which, when transcribed back into inked tracings, produced four distinct and conjoined peaks.
Dr. Hashimoto, who got his doctorate from Tokyo University, and is chief of the Hashimoto Electronics Research Center, as well as managing director and chief of research for the Fuji Electronic Industries - which produce the huge animated electrical signs that illumine Tokyo - has since demonstrated the adding capacities of his cactus to audiences all over Japan.
Asked to explain the phenomenon of his talking and adding cactus, Dr. Hashimoto, who is also, surprisingly, one of Japan's best-selling authors - his Introduction to ESP is in its sixtieth printing and his Mystery of the Fourth Dimensional World is in its eightieth - answered of present-day physics. He believes there is a world beyond the present three-dimensional world defined by physics, that this three-dimensional world is merely a shadow of a fourth-dimensional, nonmaterial world. He further believes that this fourth-dimensional world controls the three-dimensional material world through what he calls "mind concentration" or what others call psychokinesis or mind-over-matter.
