“It’s really quite simple. Animals and humans do not have consciousness. Plants have consciousness, and humans get consciousness by eating plants.”-D Pendell

Wild Seed, a novel by Butler, describes its two main characters Doro and Anyanwu as all that is male and female, respectively. She births whole tribes and heals, she talks to nature. He hunts and possesses, exercising individual will.

The Male/Female dichotomy is a very real one on the biological level. The female is the urge to merge with the vegetable matrix of mother earth. The male is the urge to individuality, identity with mind, and abstraction. The female does not need mind (probing, recursion and continuity) so much as she needs intuition (emotion, surrender to faith in the holy process).

Plants have consciousness. Animals get consciousness by eating plants. Anyanwu can become animals she eats, the meat contains the DNA which she reads, or her body reads, and can then mimic, she teaches herself, on a cellular level, to become animals that she has imbibed through the act of digestion and absorption. This is how she heals as well, she intuits that something is wrong in the cells, in the DNA/RNA transcription processing. She can fix those errors, those mutations, before they can become tumors, cancers, etc. Doro is immortal as well, but through vampiric means, he possesses the body of his victims. He is a spirit, a disembodied mind.

Anyanwu, the wild seed, can read her own DNA and change shape accordingly. To understand, through intuition, how biology works (the secret is only known by the vegetable kingdom) wild seeds can tune into that knowledge by reading their bodies and the bodies of those she consumes (plants, other animals). The rest of us can tune into some of that knowledge as well, through the use of Shamanic plants: plants have a symbiotic connection to mammalian neurochemistry, and thus reach everyone through the act of ingestion.

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The sun God, through its miracle of photosynthesis, birthed two beings: Male and Female.

God loved them very much and granted them Planet Earth, for it was positioned in an oportune spot in the solar system. Not too hot, not too cold.

Female, the more imaginative of the two, drew the lines of species on earth, creating a holistic game of give and take, niche and ecology of form. Male comes along and selects, chooses, breeds and manipulates her game, according to his own principles like natural selection and evolution. Female counters with sexual selection and female choice.

Most animals are designed with a right brain and left brain. God granted the right brain to Female and left to Male. This is why we call the right brain “creative” and “holistic” while the left is “discerning,” “analytic,” and “selective.” Remember, analysis is the opposite of synthesis or big-picture thinking.

Animals are the male principle and plants are the female principle. Female always wanted to stay closer to Daddy. By basking their leaves in the sun, plants are directly tuned into the miracle of photosynthesis. The only downside to being a plant is being rooted in place. So pollen, a male principle, insures that the DNA gets spread around to increase genetic diversity. Animals, a further extension of this principle, eat plants and move seeds around by shitting them out. Insects like bees are some of the purest devotees of plants.

The Male/Female principles can be seen in action in plant reproduction. Given the same amount of resources, the female builds ovaries, large and powerful, but few in number. The male makes pollen or sperm, in large quantities. Each grain is weak but they have strength in numbers. They play the numbers game, given one to million odds of fertilization, they make a million contenders.

There are advantages to being Doro. Imagine the freedom and power of not being able to die. But he seems cut off from the intuitive knowledge of nature and the body that Anyanwu takes part in so adeptly. Perhaps this is why male and female seem to need each other, another principle itself perhaps. If God created both, then they are from the same source, but grew to be different. They also grew around each other such that now they run the risk of co-dependency. The entire natural history of the planet has been an intense communication between these two spirits. And this communication is primarily a chemical and alchemical one; the language of DNA, cellular machinery, and its entanglement with consciousness.

The best examples of Life that has borne from Planet Earth have been when the Male and Female energies work together in harmony, instead of in competition. The current destruction of the planet is unfortunately a result of a power imbalance favoring males. The human drive to conquer nature. The female Goddess speaks quietly but convincingly through her plant messengers, but a disembodied spirit has lost touch with the message, and is now hoarding all the resources for himself.

The cure is technology, the latest manifestation of alchemy, which will synthesize human consciousness back with the vegetable matrix, creating a new emanation. The next-gen human will transcend time and space, and be like the Gods themselves.