In the botanical gardens of Asheville, North Carolina last week beneath a magnolia tree I thought about plants. Are they conscious? As every good herbalist I learn about plants through meditation and relationship with them as living, conscious beings.

Enjoying nearby flowering dogwoods and purple flowers from the pea family, I was remembering the catholic sacrament of holy communion. Communion literally means with union. In sanskrit, yoga also means union and holy communion is a holy yoga. Communion is a way of knowing, of directly experiencing the world around us. Prayer and meditation are the cause and union the result.

The opening of trade routes brought coffee and tea to the old world stimulating a new shift from the heart centers to the mind. In the age of enlightenment new methods of study evolved that were more linear than communion. The dawn of the scientist included a logical model of learning with the scientist as detached observer instead of priest as an engaged believer. In 1520 the meaning of truth changed from 'faithful' to 'accurate'. From subjective experience to objective fact.

Although science still lacks a basic model for love and emotion, belief and personal experience of the truth are no longer enough; science demands proven fact. As late as the mid 1800s a western scientist named Goethe, a contemporary of Newton, tackled the linear model of knowing. He suggests that we evolved with imagination, not as an accident, but as an important way of interpolating truth in a world where the facts are often missing. Although Goethe was not religious, his way of knowing suggests a total immersion in phenomenon not unlike the total communion at the Catholic mass or the study of yoga.

Plants are alive and their life is also mystery. Science tries to understand them by reductionist methods and chemical analysis but we evolved with plants and can call upon our ancestral experience with them. Our hypothalamus reacts directly upon contact with the plants, accessing a living and emotional knowledge of who they really are to us. By slowing down to listen, by avoiding caffeine and coffee, we can offer our bodies a more grounded, heartfelt age of enlightenment.

For more information about knowledge through direct relationship read about Goethe and Goethean Science