Some science behind the scenes
Electret
Electret (formed of elektr- from "electricity" and -et from "magnet") is the electrostatic equivalent of a permanent magnet. Waxes, polymers and resins are all electrets. Natural polymeric materials include shellac, amber, natural rubber and cellulose, which is the main constituent of wood [and paper]. Excess charge within an electret decays exponentially. So to put this very simply any charge generated in a tree, for example, will be held and builds up. Hugging a tree after days of a strong storm or high winds may provide quite a significant low frequency charge.
As a purely speculative aside, electrets may be capable of behaving a bit like a silicon chip and actually storing information. Thus in theory whatever happened near or under a tree, plant, amber and so on may be stored in its cells and through the right spiritual experience may also be capable of ‘access’ recall. This may sound hugely far-fetched, but the observations I have collected tend to provide some support for this hypothesis.
Sunspots can produce a magnetic field which in turn induces an electric current in both plants and the earth itself. In the earth we know of this current as the telluric current. Thus in times of high sunspot activity one should expect a tree to be particularly ‘charged up’. And in case you should doubt this – studies have been undertaken that prove just this fact.
 Yearly average tree potentials and sunspot numbers. |
The graph on the left shows the measurements taken by Dr Harold Saxton Burr [a member of the Yale University School of medicine for 43 years] into his study of the correlations between electric potentials and sources of those potentials. Although I have covered trees as being one potential source, scientists have discovered that all living things produce electrical 'potentials'. |
Blueprint for immortality – Dr Harold Saxton Burr
Every living system possesses an electrical field of great complexity. This can be measured with considerable certainty and accuracy and shown to have correlations with growth and development, degeneration and regeneration and the orientation of component parts in the whole system. ….......
Over the last thirty years, almost every form of living organism has been studied, some of them quite cursorily and others in more detail, from bacteria up to and including man. And so far as our present information goes, there is unequivocal evidence that wherever there is life, there are electrical properties. But again, it must be stressed that these electrical properties, … are voltage gradients, not current movements, not changes in resistance to the passage of the current.
A number of scientists have managed to measure the current that is found in, not only trees, but many living things, which may appear superficially an amazingly daft thing to do but which has yielded some quite interesting results.
Blueprint for immortality – Dr Harold Saxton Burr
In trees, the electrodes are in contact through salt bridges with the cambium layer, one about two feet above the other.
These voltage measurements have nothing to do with the alternating electrical currents which doctors find in the heart and the brain. They are pure voltage potentials which can yield only an infinitesimal amount of direct current. That is why [these fields] could not be detected before the invention of the vacuum tube voltmeter, which requires virtually no current for its operation.
An ordinary voltmeter needs so much current to swing the needle that it would drain away the field potentials and make any reading useless if not impossible
This was written in the 1970s and instruments to measure this low level of potential no longer use vacuum tubes, but there are equivalent instruments these days that use solid state technology.
For example voltmeters suitable for electrostatic measurements , extremely high input impedance and very low input capacitance are widely available; the low input capacitance and high input resistance enables measurement of these low voltages whilst at the same time transferring virtually no electric charge to/from the measured object.