Do Plants Suffer When We Eat Them?

"It's always either love or a call for love"- Course in Miracles

I often hear great intellectual exertions about plant suffering from meat eaters. They might consider it takes more plant killing to be a meat eater. But if this is an authentic and heartfelt question, I will respond. 

I have long been on a veganish path. Plants nourish me, heal me, and yes, speak to me. I am an everyday state of mind, shamanic healer. One modality I use is flower essence remedies. These are made in close cooperation with the plant devas, or plant souls. You float the flowers in a clear glass bowl in the sunshine to transfer the medicinal information from the flower to the water.  (Not all plants wish to help us. Some really love us and want to be involved with us, and some really don't really give a hoot about the humans.)

The plant kindom (yes, kindom, not kingdom, a realm of relatedness) has evolved a consciousness that is in some ways different from our usual one. I'm trying to find words here... Like when I'm lying in the grass and nibble some, the grass doesn't say ouch, it says a chemical taste type thing. Plants are much more evolved than us critters, chemistry wise, (see the work of Michael Pollan, the Botany of Desire.) 

Their desire, no, that's an anthropogenic word for it, their agenda, goes on a different axis, through time. Their sense of being present is on a sort of genetic network or whole ecosystem matrix. That sounds too geeky. Just like you do not talk to a beautiful woman by looking at her breasts, you be present with plants by speaking with their lineage, their deva, and less by looking at their body. When you pick herbs in the wild, you ask the grandmother plant of that place, or the biggest oldest one.

When I'm there in the grassy meadow, surrounded by the forest, the grass is like the fur of a huge Mother Earth. Plucking a bit of it does not cause any distress on anyone's part. When you lose a hair, you do not notice it. But if all your hair starts falling out suddenly, as with the Earths forests, you bet it gets noticed! 

Human science that purports to hear plants 'screaming' is contaminated by the fact of our observing:  Plants, like humans, other animals, crystals, etc, register and respond to OUR thoughts and feelings around them. Their bodies, evolved to grapple with Earth conditions, automatically repair damage, just as ours do, and in both cases it goes mostly unnoticed. When skin cells slough off, we do not mourn, or feel guilty, or suffer.

Most plants are group beings. When you walk in the forest here, there stand large stumps grown over completely by bark, still alive, fed, and connected to the other trees and the forest. Underground, the mushrooms form a network that selectively feeds, waters, and balances the needs of the networks and cycles of the roots of all the plants. It is a community. We do not hurt plants by eating them as long as we keep in harmony with the agenda of the whole system, and honor their lineage.