Last week, some people staying at the guest house asked to see it. I went and fetched the U1 from its case, I placed the two electrodes on a leaf, one above, one below, I tightened the clip just enough for the contact to hold without hurting it. The MIDI cable runs to the computer, I choose a sound, a soft voice, and I wait. Thirty seconds, a minute. Then the plant comes in.

There were four of them around the table. There is always that moment, in the first few bars, when someone holds their breath. Then the questions come, always the same ones, in the same order, and I answer them with sentences I know by heart because I have been saying them for ten years.

It was while putting the device away that it hit me. The U1 still gets used almost every week. It is used for Claire’s treatments, it is used for demonstrations, it is used to let people hear something they will carry away in their ear. It is no longer used for searching. The logbook has stayed open at a page I have not turned in a long time.

That is the real subject of this blog’s silence. Not the lack of time, not the move, not the other projects. The instrument has become an object of use.

Where it stopped

After the house plants, then the trees on the land, the work moved towards the mineral. It was the logical next step. Vegeanity, as I understand it, does not stop at the edge of the leaf: it recognises a form of consciousness in the plant, the animal and the mineral, all the living as one people. Of course I had to go and look at stone.

And things did happen. I obtained results with the stones, I stand by them, they were real. But I never managed to build a stable protocol around them.

It has to be said in those terms, without dressing it up. With a plant, I had ended up with a few bearings. I knew roughly what a plain and simple reaction to the surroundings looked like (the light changing, someone coming into the room, watering) and what something else looked like, a gesture, a direct address, an answer to a question asked. The distinction was not perfect, but it worked, and above all it repeated itself. With stone, never. I did not find the baseline. I did not find the setup that gives the same behaviour twice in two comparable conditions. What I obtained one day, I did not know how to do again the next, and I could not say why.

Without a protocol, I could not vouch for those results. I could not stabilise them, nor hand them to someone else in a form they could take up in turn. Let me be clear: I am not saying those experiments are worthless. They can be told, they can be passed on, they have made their way in the people I told them to. My work is artistic and scientific at once and I fully own that. But for stone, I wanted something more, and I did not get it.

This is not a spiritual lesson, and I refuse to turn it into wisdom. It is a failure of method. I did not have the right instruments, I did not have the right measuring framework, and I did not know how to build them at that time.

And let me spell this out, because the confusion is easy to make. I do not believe for one second that what is not proven does not exist. Look at Jagadish Chandra Bose: he had built a remarkable device, his measurements were beyond dispute, and yet people still speak of the plant world as though no one were there. Look today at Monica Gagliano and Stefano Mancuso, who produce reproducible and verifiable experiments, and who are mocked and accused of bad faith. Part of science sits on its power and has no wish for anyone to touch what it has gained. Proof, on its own, opens no door.

So if I look for protocols, it is not to sound “scientific”. It is first of all to rid myself of the doubts which, despite a daily practice begun in 2009 and an awakening in 2012, keep flooding in. What if it were the product of my imagination?

Nor should this be underestimated: being able to sit down with protocols that work, if only here, lets me understand better, ask questions, and get answers I would not have known how to formulate on my own. It is also, as a side effect, a way of reaching those who sense that something larger surrounds us, and who sometimes, through these bridges, begin their own path into philosophical idealism.

For me it is a conviction: everything that exists and carries information is consciousness. That is what the Kybalion sums up, in the lineage of Hermes Trismegistus, in its first principle, “The Universe is mental”. And yet I keep developing tools to help demonstrate that consciousness exists everywhere. In plants, and in stones too.

What I did instead

When the tool no longer keeps up, a practitioner does not stop. They work another way. I drifted, without really deciding to, towards direct dialogue.

Direct means without a device. Sitting down in front of the tree, asking the question, waiting, receiving. Those who practise know what I am talking about and do not need me to describe it. Those who do not practise will not take my word for the description, and they are right, it is not a thing you believe from a description, you have to experience it.

What this dialogue gives is speed and delicacy. No interface gets in the way, no latency, no gain setting to watch. The conversation goes where it wants, onto subjects no word keyboard contains. In ten years of work with the keyboards, I have built two hundred words spread over ten thematic keyboards, and that is a considerable undertaking for a vocabulary that remains narrow. Direct dialogue does not have that limit.

What it does not give is a trace that others can take up. It can be told, and told very well, but it cannot be replayed. Nobody can sit down in my place and travel the same road to see where it ends up. It is not shareable, except through the “miracles” that those around us see and hear of our adventures.

For a few years, that was enough for me. To move forward here, at Le Parédé, in the governance, in the setting up of the place, of our crops and of our relationship with the animals, it has even been an extraordinary playground and testing ground. Today I regret not having shared them all with you.

With age, with my eyes beginning to turn towards those who come after us, I realise that the sum of this work has to be passed on. So it is no longer enough for me. Not because the account would be inferior, but because I would like others to be able to come in, and an account only opens the door to those already willing to push it.

What the device is still used for

The U1 is not in the cupboard, it has changed function. Three uses, all of them alive.

The treatments. At Le Parédé, we offer a treatment with the music of the plants. The person stays for thirty minutes, alone with the plant and its setup, for thirty euros. It is not a consultation, it is not a therapy, and it obviously replaces nothing that allopathic medicine does. It is a parallel form of support, and the people who come out of it are perfectly able to say for themselves what they found there.

The basis of the Protéodies. Here I draw on the work of the physicist Joël Sternheimer, who established a correspondence between the vibrational oscillations of amino acid chains and musical harmony. Protéodies© have become a way of regulating the biosynthesis of the corresponding proteins, by supporting certain chains or on the contrary inhibiting those responsible for diseases or malfunctions. The patent is held by Génodics©. This is the field the botanist Jean Thoby works in, and it is through him that I came to know of this research.

What interests me in it, and what connects with the rest of this post, is that a plant fitted with the U1 translates the movement of its lymph and its sap into music, and that these melodies do not seem to be a matter of indifference to whoever is in the room. I have heard things on that score, others have been reported to me. I do not have a study in front of me, with a protocol, a sample size and a date, so I stop there and I quote no figures. The day I can point to published work, I will, and it will be more interesting than anything I could assert here.

The demonstrations. Those at the guest house, those at gatherings. Since the Grand Rex concert in 2015, it has always been the same gesture, showing that this exists and letting people make of it what they will.

What is opening the door again

Two things have shifted.

The first is a device. And I want to be precise, because I am often made to say the opposite. The U1 is proprietary, but it can be bought online for around seven hundred and fifty euros. Anyone can get hold of one and try. It is not a secret box, it is not a privilege, and that is not where the problem lies.

The problem is elsewhere, and I have been looking into it since 2018. The U1 lacks subtlety, and above all it demands an enormous physical effort from the plant. The plant works by filling and emptying, and this device asks a lot of it to give back little. I have tested any number of setups without finding a single one that does better. I have contacted electronics engineers, without result.

My greatest regret is not having managed to interest Hans Otto König. He is a German trained in physics and psychology, an electronics specialist by trade, who has spent some fifty years on instrumental transcommunication and has built, in order to capture voices, devices of a delicacy I have seen nowhere else. If we had the equivalent turned towards plants and towards stones, I do not doubt for a second that we would have major breakthroughs. Whether they would be believed or accepted is another matter.

That is the path VegeOhm is pursuing, a plant bio-impedance sensor built on a Wheatstone bridge and an ESP32. The V2 board is ready, the firmware and the assembly are ahead of us. I designed it with the assistance of artificial intelligence and of my new structure, EIFFEL AI. I am not announcing it as a finished object, because it is not one.

What I am after is not to replace a closed box with an open one. It is an instrument fine enough that the plant no longer has to exhaust itself to be heard, and simple enough that others can come in. At the very least, it has to let us start working with stones, which live in a timescale and a subtlety another notch beyond plants.

The second is a processing capacity. Artificial intelligence has become the business of EIFFEL AI and a large part of my days. I will not write here that AI is going to make the stones speak. That would be grotesque, and it is not what I observe. What I do see, more modestly, is that it is becoming possible to hold signals we did not know how to hold: long, noisy series, with no obvious landmark, where you have to look for a regularity you have not defined in advance. That is exactly the wall I ran into with the mineral. It guarantees nothing. It makes taking the work up again reasonable.

What comes next

I am reopening this blog. The last post published here dates from August 2022, and the last serious assessment goes back much further, to the great messages of 2017.

There is a quantity of material that has never been put online, plant journals, messages from the Catalpa, from Érable, from the Fern, a decoding protocol written and never published. I will take all of that up as it comes, out of order if need be. I promise neither schedule nor frequency, I have been down that road before.

The logbook is open again at the page where I left it. It carries a question about a stone, and I still do not have the answer.