Faced with what Backster was saying, I had several options, presumably the same options with which readers are faced concerning my interactions with coyotes. I could believe he is lying, as is everyone else who has ever made similar observations. I could believe that what he was saying is true, which would validate everything I have experienced but would require that the whole notion of repeatability in the scientific method be reworked, along with preconceived notions of consciousness, communication, perception, and so on. Or I could believe that he's overlooked some strictly mechanistic explanation. I said all this, then mentioned that I'd seen an account of one scientist who insisted there had to be a loose wire in his lie detector.
He responded, "In thirty-one years of research I've found all my loose wires. No, I can't see any mechanistic solution. Some parapsychologists believe I've mastered the art of psychokinesis—that I move the pen with my mind—which would be a pretty good trick in itself. But they overlook the fact that I've automated and randomized many of the experiments to where I'm not even aware of what's going on until later, when I study the resulting charts and videotapes. The conventional explanations have worn pretty thin. One such explanation, proposed in Harper's, was static electricity: if you scuffle across the room and touch the plant, you get a response. But of course I seldom touch the plant during periods of observation, and in any case the response would be totally different."
"So, what is the signal picked up by the plant?" "I don't know. I don't believe the signal, whatever it is, dissipates over distance, which is what we'd get if we were dealing with electromagnetic phenomenon. I used to hook up a plant, then take a walk with a randomized timer in my pocket. When the timer went off, I'd return home. The plant always responded the moment I turned around, no matter the distance. And the signal from Phoenix was just as strong as if Brian O'Leary were in the next room.
"Also, we've attempted to screen the signal using lead-lined containers, and other materials, but we can't screen it out. This makes me think the signal doesn't actually go from here to there, but instead manifests itself in different places. All this, of course, lands us firmly in the territory of the metaphysical, the spiritual. Think about prayer, for instance. If you were to pray to God, and God was hanging out on the far side of the galaxy, and your prayer traveled at the speed of light, your bones would long-since be dust before God could respond. But if God—however you define God—is everywhere, the prayer doesn't have to travel." I thought not so much about God as I did of stars, and the courage they gave me when I was a child, and the thoughts and memories I gave to them. Cleve and I were both silent for a long moment. I looked at the tape recorder on the table between us, and saw the slow rotation of the spools. I thought again about the caring of the stars, and said, "Primary perception suggests a radical redefinition of consciousness."
"You mean it would do away with the notion of consciousness as something on which humans have a monopoly?" He hesitated a moment, then continued, "Western science exaggerates the role of the brain in consciousness. Whole books have been written on the consciousness of the atom. Consciousness might exist on an entirely different level. Some very good research has been done on remote viewing, that is, describing conditions at a distant location. More good research has been done on survival after bodily death. All of it points toward the notion that consciousness need not specifically be linked with gray matter. That is another straitjacket we need to rid ourselves of."
I thought of another story that Jeannette once told me. She had been interviewing a shaman from an indigenous group in the north of Russia. He told her that the year before the caribou had been very late. Hunting parties returned with no meat. The shaman had gone into a trance, and on coming out had told the hunters where to go. They went to the indicated valley, and found the caribou. Jeannette asked him, through a translator, "How did you know where they were?" He held his hands open in front of him, and said, "How do you know where your fingers are?"
Cleve continued, "The brain may have some things to do with memory, but a strong case can be made that much memory is not stored there."
I thought of my difficulty sleeping, then thought also of high jumping. I said, "The whole point of training in athletics seems to be to build memories in the muscles." He nodded, and I pushed the questioning about consciousness further, asking whether he has worked with materials that would normally be considered inanimate.
He answered, "I've shredded some things and suspended them in agar. I get electric signals, but not necessarily relating to anything going on in the environment. It's too crude an electroding pattern for me to decipher. But I do suspect that consciousness goes much much further.
"In 1987 I participated in a University of Missouri program that included a talk by Dr. Sidney Fox, then connected with the Institute for Molecular and Cellular Evolution at the University of Miami. Fox had recorded electric signals from proteinlike material that showed properties strikingly similar to those of living cells. The simplicity of the material he used and the self-organizing capability it displayed suggest to me that biocommunication was present at the earliest states in the evolution of life on this planet. Of course the Gaia hypothesis—the idea that the earth is a great big working organism, with a lot of corrections built in—fits in nicely with this. I don't think it would be a stretch to take the hypothesis further and presume that the planet itself is intelligent."
I asked how his work has been received in other parts of the world.
"The Russians and other eastern Europeans have always been very interested. And whenever I encounter Indian scientists— Buddhist or Hindu—and we talk about what I do, instead of giving me a bunch of grief they say, 'What took you so long?' My work dovetails very well with many of the concepts embraced by Hinduism and Buddhism."
"What is taking us so long?"
"The fear is that, if what I am observing is accurate, many of the theories on which we've built our lives need complete reworking. I've known biologists to say, 'If Backster is right, we're in trouble.' It takes a certain kind of character and personality to even attempt such a questioning of fundamental assumptions. The Western scientific community, and actually all of us, are in a difficult spot, because in order to maintain our current mode of being, we must ignore a tremendous amount of information. And more information is being gathered all the time. For instance, have you heard of Rupert Sheldrake s work with dogs? He puts a time-recording camera on both the dog at home and the human companion at work. He has discovered that even if people come home from work at a different time each day, at the moment the person leaves work, the dog at home heads for the door.
“Even mainstream scientists are stumbling all over this biocommunication phenomenon. It seems impossible, given the sophistication of modern instrumentation, for us to keep missing this fundamental attunement of living things. Only for so long are we going to be able to pretend it's the result of 'loose wires.' We cannot forever deny that which is so clearly there."
It was good to receive this validation, but I didn't want to trust Backster: he could be lying, or he could be crazy. Just because the story hangs together doesn't mean it accurately represents reality.
We went to dinner, and then I took a long walk. I returned late, and Cleve set me up on pads in the basement. I slept fitfully: the room was too large, too unfamiliar, and with too many corners and too many doors. At last I dragged my sleeping bag into a small room off to the side, barricaded one door with a chair and the other with my feet, and began to doze.
He awakened me early, and we returned to the lab. I wanted to see "the Backster Effect" for myself. He hooked up a plant, and I watched the paper roll out of the recorder. I couldn't correlate the movement of the pen with anything I was feeling, or with the conversation. One of his cats began to play with the plant. The oscillations of the pen seemed to increase in magnitude, but I couldn't be sure. Halfheartedly, I suggested burning the plant. No response from the plant. Cleve responded, "I don't think you really want t
o, and besides, I wouldn't let you."
We moved to another part of the lab, and he put yogurt into a sterilized test tube, then inserted a pair of sterilized gold electrodes. We began again to talk. The pen wriggled up and down, and once again seemed to lurch just as I took in my breath to disagree with something he said. But I couldn't be sure. When we see something, how do we know if it is real, or do we see it only because we wish so much to believe?
Cleve left to take care of business elsewhere in the building. The line manifesting the electrical response of the yogurt immediately went flat. I tried to fabricate anger, thinking of clearcuts and the politicians who legislate them, thinking about abused children and their abusers. Still flat. Either fabricated emotions don't count (as Cleve had suggested), or it's a sham, or something else was terribly wrong. Perhaps the yogurt was not interested in me. Losing interest myself, I began to wander the lab. My eyes fell on a calendar, which on closer inspection I saw was actually an advertisement for a shipping company. I felt a surge of anger at the ubiquity of advertising. Then I realized—a spontaneous emotion! I dashed to the chart, and saw a sudden spike corresponding to the moment I'd felt the anger. Then more flatline. And more flatline. And more. Again I began to wander the lab, and again I saw something that triggered an emotion. This was a poster showing a map of the human genome. I thought of the Human Genome Diversity Project, a monumental study hated by many indigenous peoples and their allies for its genocidal implications (Backster is not affiliated with or particularly a fan of the program; I later found he simply likes the poster). Another surge of anger, another dash to the chart, and another spike in the graph, from instants before I started to move.
Finally Cleve came back. Even the scientist in me was happy. I had previously experienced this attunement in the field, felt it with coyotes, dogs, trees, stars. And now I had seen it in the laboratory.
Death and Awakening
"In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, For the straight way was lost." Dante Alighieri
MY BEES DIED FOR the first time in the spring of 1985.
Beekeeping in California promises not only cash, but danger. One of the reasons Glen and I pushed so hard when we moved bees is that growers generally want them in as soon as the bloom gets underway, but no sooner, because they want to apply insecticides until the last moment. They want the bees out when the petals drop, for the same reason. You never know precisely when blossoms are going to pop: rain may delay, or a nice day hasten, the flowers opening. Nor do you know when the petals will fall: a hot wind can rob the trees of flowers in just a couple of hours. Then you can bet growers will be spraying chemicals the next day. Even with this constant movement on the part of beekeepers, about 50,000 beehives—nearly ten percent of the total present—are killed each year in California by pesticides.
Oranges are one of the most dangerous crops. Even during the bloom, when growers are prohibited from applying insecticides except in the case of (routine) emergencies, every morning I found abnormally large piles of dead bees in front of each hive, and hundreds of walking wounded: disoriented bees dragging hind legs as if paralyzed, wings fluttering spasmodically.
Each day I called the county extension office to find when the ban on pesticides would be lifted, and one Thursday they announced it would end at dawn on Saturday morning. I immediately called a trucking broker to hire a flatbed semi to haul the bees to northeastern Nevada, where I had arranged sites on pastures of alfalfa and clover to keep the bees through the summer. The first broker I called didn't handle flatbeds, nor did the second. The third said he would check around for me and find something. I called him back late in the afternoon, and he said there were none to be found. He would, however, be able to rent me a refrigerated van.
I later learned that I was gullible, and intentionally deceived. Flatbeds were everywhere; I had merely called the wrong three brokers. The final one, not willing to send me on as had the others, merely lied. Though I didn't know all that at the time, I did know that on rare occasions beekeepers hire refrigerated vans to move their bees, refrigeration being crucial to keep the hives from overheating during the long drive in close confinement. Because my hives were on pallets for ease of loading, I insisted that the interior of the van be wide enough to accommodate two pallets side-by-side. The broker reassured me.
I woke up before dawn on Friday to perform a final check on the hives before strapping them four tight to a pallet. By now, because of swarms, I had about 320 colonies. I finished strapping about seven in the evening, and drove to meet the trucker at a restaurant. We returned to the drop. I had arranged for my friend the wasp farmer to help me with his forklift. He would place the pallets in the back of the trailer, and I would use a pallet jack to position them inside.
The truck was too small. I couldn't fit pallets two wide, which meant that in order to accommodate anywhere near all of my hives, I would have to remove many of them from the pallets to hand stack them in corners and spare spaces. Had I not been anticipating the massed arrival of cropdusters the next morning, I would have sent the trucker on his way and called another broker. But that was no longer an option.
I loaded what pallets I could, then began to hand stack. Plugged with honey, the hives weighed a hundred to a hundred and fifty pounds a piece. The bees, of course, were crawling everywhere. Sometime during the night the netting covering my face developed a rip, and I began to get stung. Since it was dark, I couldn't see the tear, and so didn't know where bees were getting into my suit. Holding a hundred-and-fifty-pound box full of tens of thousands of bees, you can't simply drop it to scrape away the stinger. And there was work to be done. For the first twenty or so times, I relied on my ability to wall off pain. For the next twenty, I cursed, not too loud because the wasp farmer was a devout Seventh-Day Adventist. For the third twenty, I begged the bees to stop. After that I lost count.
About seven-thirty in the morning we finished. We had been able to cram all but eight of the hives into the semi, and put the rest in the back of my pickup. I took off my suit, and at long last began to scrape stingers, their poison sacs by now long empty, off my face. I stopped to get some quick breakfast, and the waitress pointed out I had bees crawling in my hair.
I drove all day. The truck ended up miles behind me—some sort of problem getting gas money from the broker—but I had given the trucker careful directions to the drop site. It was a twelve-hour drive, and I looked forward to unloading the bees— another night's work—and finally going to my rented house in Carlin, Nevada (another hour-and-a-half drive), and sleeping for a couple of days. Then I would move the bees to their summer sites.
But that's not what happened. All day as I drove, I kept hearing the bees die. Of course they were hundreds of miles away. Perhaps it was Backster's "primary perception" brought to a conscious level. All I know is that I perceived first their distress and then their deaths all through the day and into the evening, and when the trucker finally arrived at the drop, I was not surprised when I opened the doors to see a two-foot-deep river of dead bees, honey, and melted wax pour out the rear of the trailer. The trucks refrigeration unit had broken down, and the inside had grown hot enough to melt beeswax, hot enough to kill bees. 1 was sad, I was tired—exhausted really—my head hurt, and my arms and legs ached. But I was not surprised.
I spent the night unloading the remains. The next morning, dawn creeping over the mountains to the east, I drove home, too tired to feel anything. I slept.
Not only bees died in 1985. I died also, from Crohn's disease, pain, internal bleeding, and self-control.
Looking back, it's clear I've had Crohn's since I was young, but it wasn't diagnosed until I was twenty-four. As a child I often had stomach cramps that doubled me over, or left me pressing my face to the surface of my desk at school, closing my eyes, and going away. Also, my growth spurt was late—I was five feet, two inches, in eighth grade, before shooting to six feet by the end of high school—something I've since learne
d is symptomatic of Crohn's. And then there's my metabolism: even among teenaged boys I had a reputation as a trencherman, easily putting away fifteen or twenty tacos at a meal and still, at six feet, weighing less than a hundred and forty pounds.
The real problems commenced in college. After I started jumping (my weight now up to one fifty-five), I began to suffer diarrhea the day of every meet. I thought it was nerves. Then I got diarrhea the day before, then the day before that, then the day before that, until more often than not, in season and out, I had the flux. At the time the cramps were not severe.
Crohn's is an incurable progressive disease which, during flareups, causes sores to appear along the gastrointestinal tract, anywhere from the lips to the anus, centering on the bowels, especially the colon. It has many side effects, some of which I have (arthritis, anemia, constant fatigue, clubbing of the fingers), and some of which I don't (fistulas, iridis, a horrifying skin condition called pyoderma gangrenosum). It is characterized, as I discovered in the summer of 1985, by abdominal cramping more painful than broken bones, more painful, I've since heard from women who have the disease, than childbirth.
No one knows what causes it. Studies have shown the bowels of those with Crohn's to be generally more permeable to large molecules than the norm, but no one knows what, if anything, that means. Studies have also shown that the disease is extremely rare in nonindustrialized nations, even after accounting for misdiagnoses at less sophisticated medical facilities; for example, believing that someone who actually died of Crohn's died of dysentery. Then as industries enter a region, so does the disease: Japan had few cases prior to World War II, and now has one of the highest rates in the world. This means that not only metaphorically but in all physical truth industrial civilization is eating away at my guts.
The disease came on hard in the weeks after the death of the bees, probably in great measure because of the physical strain of too little sleep for too many months in the front of the truck, and too many nights moving bees. But something else was happening as well. I was dying.
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