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Not only do different species of plants have different feelings associated with them, but also there is considerable individual variation in personalities between different plants of the same species, between different branches on the same plant, and even between different leaves on the same branch.  By lightly holding a leaf for a moment between your thumb and forefinger, you can feel which leaves want to be picked for medicine or food purposes and which ones want to be left alone.  The leaves that want to be picked have a high, vibrant feel to them, whereas leaves that don’t want to be picked feel dead in your hand.

            Even if you can’t seem to tune in to the feelings of plants, you can still telepathically “talk” with them.  Plants can talk to you in thoughts, and these (at first) seem indistinguishable from your own thoughts.  That is, it will seem to you that you are the one who is thinking these thoughts, when in fact it is the plants which are sending you messages.  That’s why it’s important to have your own mind as quiet as possible – to be in a relaxed mood – if you expect plants to talk to you; if your own mind is buzzing, there’s no way the plants can get a word in edgewise.  Any thoughts or feelings you have while sitting under a tree or working with plants are probably messages from the plants.

           So how do you know if you are actually communicating with a plant, and not just imagining it?  The answer is:  you don’t.  You just go with your intuition rather than  going with your concepts, what you’ve been taught.  Instead of hypnotizing yourself into believing that the world of concepts is reality, you hypnotize yourself into believing that the world of feelings – of magic – is reality.  The only difference between these two equally valid points of view is that from one of them plants talk to you, and from the other they don’t.If you feel self-conscious talking to plants, just remember that what you have been programmed to call the “real” world is merely a figment of your imagination also.  And if you start calling something else the real world, then that something else becomes the real world; it becomes as real as this one.If you’re dubious, just ask the plant over and over,  “Is this you, Mr. or Ms. Plant talking to me, or am I just imagining it?”  And if you keep getting the same answer over and over, “It’s me, the plant!  It’s me, the plant!” – then just assume that it is indeed the plant talking to you, and listen to what it has to say.  You can ask questions and get answers, both questions and answers coming as though you were holding a conversation in your own mind.  It’s easy to learn to talk with house and garden plants, since these are particularly eager to discuss matters such as fertilization, watering, shade, grafting and transplanting techniques, etc.  But in addition to such mundane affairs, plants (particularly large trees) can give you helpful advice on all sorts of matters.  Take them your problems; ask them what they think you should do.  Some of my best friends and most trusted advisors are trees.

             Whether you are consciously aware of it or not, you are already communicating with plants all the time.  The soothing, healing, tranquilizing feeling that comes when you are gardening or are out in nature is in fact your psychic attunement to the joyous vibrations of the plants around you.  To follow this feeling one step further – to its source – is to put yourself into direct communication with the plants.  It’s as easy as smiling at a baby. 

(excerpted from Bob Makransky’s book Magical Living, Copyright © 2001 by Bob Makransky.  All rights reserved) 

More of Bob Makransky’s articles are posted at:  www.dearbrutus.com  Subscribe to Bob Makransky’s free monthly ezine at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MagicalAlmanac

Now even the least psychic person, going up to a large tree, should be able to pick up something of the personality (mood) of that tree.  How does the tree make you feel – happy, sad, loving, jolly, heavy?  Can you pick up its sex:  sense a male or female presence – or its age:  young and vigorous or old and mellow?

This isn’t all that hard to do – you can call upon your senses to buttress your feelings, as in the exercise of seeing pictures in the clouds, except that you do it by feeling rather than thinking – by relaxing into the process rather than controlling it.  It’s exactly what a rationalist would term “anthropomorphism.”

For example, spiky trees (like palmettos and Joshua trees) have a sassy, masculine energy.  Cedar trees tend to be clowns or wise guys.  Banana trees are joyous and loving.  Weeping trees really do have a doleful air about them.  Tall, erect trees have proud and regal personalities. Trees that seem to be reaching longingly for the heavens are reaching longingly for the heavens.

A good time to learn to connect emotionally with trees is when they’re dying.  The next time you see a tree being felled, pause and quiet down your thoughts and watch it attentively.  You should easily be able to feel the tree’s agony just before it falls, since trees (and all beings) are filled with power at the moment of their deaths and profoundly affect the beings around them.  Loggers triumphantly yell “Timber!” when a tree falls to cover their sense of shame and disconnectedness – to block communication with the tree at the moment of its death.

Another good time to pick up on plants’ feelings is when they are in motion.  Plants are happiest when they are moving – blown by the wind and the rain.  Wave back to them when they wave at you (it’s only polite).  Watch how they dance in the breeze.  See how the trees which overhang roads and walkways cast down blessings on all who pass beneath them.  See how the young growing tips are more alert, vigorous, and naively impetuous than the older and mellower lower leaves.  Be aware of the awareness of plants:  when you walk through a wood or meadow, feel as though you were walking through a crowd of people, all of whom are watching you.

                Some people pick up on the feelings of plants by seeing faces in the bark or foliage.  They impose that thought form (of a face with a giggly, dour, saucy, etc. expression) over the feeling of the tree, since that’s how most people are conditioned to interpret feelings – by associating them with facial expressions.

What we’re tying to get at are feelings, which can be apprehended directly, without any need for sensory cues.  However, the senses can provide a useful point of reference and serve as a bridge between imagination and pure feeling, which is how they function in dreams.  When you see with your feelings rather than your mind, your visual attention isn’t focused on any one thing, but rather everything within your field of vision strikes your attention with equal impact (vividness), as it does in dreams.  To see this way you have to have your mind quiet, and you have to be in a joyous and abandoned mood.  If you’re bummed out or grumpy, you won’t be able to see what plants are feeling any more than you’d be able to see a baby smile at you.

                    Much of our social training entails learning to stifle our senses – to not see what is right before our eyes, to not listen to what our ears are hearing, to be offended by smells, discomfited by touch.  Cutting off our senses leaves us feeling apathetic and disconnected from our world.  Therefore, if we want to renew our feeling of connectedness which we had as infants, we have to start plugging our senses into our feelings again.  And because they are so nonthreatening, feeling with plants is a good place to start.

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        Plants’ experience of being in the world is very different from the experience of us animals.  Because plants cannot move about, they exist in a state of profound acceptance and peace within themselves.  Emotions such as fear, hate, jealousy, possessiveness, etc. are wholly unknown to plants and would serve no useful purpose.  On the other hand, plants are capable of experiencing a wide range of higher emotions the like of which we animals could scarcely conceive.

            At the same time, there are feelings which plants share with us animals, such as love, pain, joy, thirst, etc.    It is the feelings we share with plants which provide the basis of our ability to communicate with them.

            Feeling with plants is not so different from feeling with people.  For example, when we are about to have sex with someone who really turns us on, we feel a palpable surge of sexual energy connecting us to that person.  Similarly, when we walk into a room to face someone who is madder than hell at us, we feel connected to that person by a palpable wave of anger and fear.  When a baby smiles at us, we feel a rush of joy that has us automatically smile back.  However, most of our interactions with other people do not have this feeling of connectedness and emotional immediacy.   Most of the time we don’t even look the people we are addressing in the eye, let alone feel with them.  Because of our social training, we tend to regard sharing feelings with other people as threatening.  We are taught to close up and defend ourselves, and to keep our interactions as sterile and devoid of feeling as possible.

            In order to communicate with plants (or people), you have to be able to regard them as your equals.  If you are afraid (ashamed) to talk with homeless people, beggars, crazy people, etc. then you’ll also find it difficult to talk with plants.  However, it’s actually easier to communicate with plants than it is to communicate with people because plants don’t have defenses and self-importance agendas in place which engage our own defenses and self-importance agendas.  To feel with plants (or people) doesn’t mean to gush all over them; all it means is to recognize them as beings whose feelings are as important to them as your feelings are to you. 

When first learning to communicate with plants, it helps to be in contact with the same individual plants on a daily basis.  Ideally you should go out, preferably alone, to the same tree or meadow for at least a few minutes every day.  If you can’t do this, cultivating garden or house plants will work just as well, although it’s easiest to communicate with large trees.  This is because from a feeling (light fiber) point of view, humans and trees are very much alike – the light fiber (auric glow) configurations of both humans and trees are quite similar, whereas that of insects, for example, is very different from either.  It is easier for humans and trees to communicate with each other than it is for either to communicate with insects.

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                         On television and in movies magicians are portrayed as having special powers that they are born with, such as freezing or repelling enemies, making things appear and disappear, and so forth.  This is untrue.  Magicians are like everyone else, but perhaps are more psychic and intuitive than the norm.   The difference between magicians and most people is one of degree rather than of kind.  Magicians tend to be more rebellious than average, and less fearful of the consequences of their rebellion.  In other words, magicians tend to be more ready to fly with their impulses than are most people. 

This misperception about magic and magicians is a shame, since the truth about magic is far more interesting, compelling, and personally applicable in our own lives than the false stereotypes which appear in the popular media. It’s not that magicians have supernormal powers.  Rather, from the magicians’ point of view, most people are walking around with both hands – their intuition and intent – tied behind their backs.  They are in thrall to their fear – e.g. their fear of death, or of their own natural sexual desires.  They learn this fear from their parents and society, and they pass it on to their own children in turn.  This fear of not measuring up to society’s norms, or of being unmasked as phonies, paralyzes people’s wills and stifles their attunement to their own true feelings.  Thus, to most people, magicians’ use of their “hands” – their intent and intuition – seems like the use of supernormal powers.  However, magicians have no power beyond what most people possess – they just use their power.  They use their intuition to process incoming information, and they use their intent to influence the outside world.  Most magicians don’t even know that they are magicians.  They do not understand or consider what they are doing to be magic, since it comes so naturally to them.  Magicians who happen to be Christians or capitalists would scoff at the idea that they are magicians using magic.  But anyone who applies the techniques of magic to get what they want from life, anyone who has some degree of mastery in the use of intuition and intent, is a magician.  An excellent example is Abraham Lincoln.

When Abraham Lincoln was nine years old he was whipping a horse to make her get up saying, “Git up, you old hussy; git up…” when the horse kicked him in the head and killed him. He lay dead all night and then suddenly regained consciousness, saying “…you old hussy!”, thus finishing what he had started to say before he was kicked.  From that time on he had frequent prophetic dreams, and was attracted to psychic phenomena (he even held spiritualist seances at the White House).

Shortly after his election in 1860, Lincoln was looking in a mirror and was startled to see a double image of his face - one face alive and vibrant, the other face ghostly pale. He interpreted this to mean that he would have two terms as president, and make it safely through the first term, but would die before the end of the second term.

Lincoln believed that any dream had a meaning if you could be wise enough to find it. He always had the same dream - of himself in a strange boat moving very fast towards some indefinite shore - before every major battle (Sumter, Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, etc.); he had this same dream the night before he was assassinated.

Two weeks before he was assassinated he had a dream which disturbed him very much: he heard sobbing, as if a crowd of people were weeping, so he left his bed and wandered downstairs following the sound of sobbing, from empty room to empty room. Finally he arrived at the East Room, and was startled to see a bier with a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it was stationed an honor guard of soldiers, and a crowd of people mourning and sobbing. “Who is dead in the White House?”, he asked one of the soldiers. “The President. He was killed by an assassin!”, was the answer. Then a loud burst of grief from the crowd woke him from his dream.

According to his bodyguard, Crook, the president was intensely serious and depressed the day he was assassinated. He spoke of the likelihood of his someday being assassinated (usually Lincoln avoided all talk about his safety, and he never brought the topic up himself).  Although he was usually fond of the theater, he didn’t want to go that night; but he didn’t want to disappoint the public who knew he’d be there.

When they reached the door of the White House that night Lincoln looked his bodyguard in the eye and told him, “Good-bye, Crook.” Up until then it had always been, “Good-night, Crook.”

(The information above is taken from Carl Sandburg’s Life of Lincoln)

More of Bob Makransky’s articles are posted at:  www.dearbrutus.com  

Subscribe to Bob Makransky’s free monthly ezine at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MagicalAlmanac

The purpose of this weblog is to show people who live in a workaday world that magic is real; and how they can bring magic into their own lives without radically altering their lifestyles.

Magic can be defined as the intentional manipulation of luck by means of the deliberate cultivation of intuition. Magic is not a matter of altered states of consciousness, or of ooga-booga rituals to invoke spirits (although it does involve such things). Rather, magic is a matter of liberating ourselves from our social conditioning by learning how to operate on intent – direct knowing and acting – rather than by thought. Thus magic can be considered a form of psychotherapy – of dehypnotizing and rehypnotizing ourselves to release the obsessive fixation of everyday life.

Our society teaches us that magic is an escape from reality. On the contrary, the practice of magic is a way of coming to grips with reality directly; of seeing the way things really are, and acting on that understanding.

The knowledge of magic is as ancient as humankind. Moreover, all of us already knew it as children; but we have forgotten it in our rush to make a buck and to fulfill our society’s expectations. The time for magic has come around again. Magic and astrology will rise once more if the human race is to survive, not to mention prosper.

More of Bob Makransky’s articles are posted at:  www.dearbrutus.com  

Subscribe to Bob Makransky’s free monthly ezine at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MagicalAlmanac