Lost Knowledge

 In 1987, the late Jay Mikesell and I spent some time at Eva Reichs' place in Maine, having tutoring in Orgone Biophysics from her. We paid her for that tutoring. As far as I know, we were the only ones ever to have such tutoring, and she once told me that of all the people who had asked her about her fathers' work, I was the only one who asked the right questions.

 

We taped the whole thing, and I still have about 22 hours of the seminar on tape. Maybe someday, if I ever get the money, I will have it transcribed and made into a book.

 

Since Jay died a few years ago, I guess that leaves me as the only person left to have had training in orgone biophysics from the person Reich designated as his successor. I have a letter from Eva Reich testifying to that, and saying she considers me "very knowledgeable in that field".

 

Maybe someday, if anyone is interested, I will give a seminar and try to pass on some of that knowledge.

 

Eva should have been teaching all those years after Reich died; the unfortunate circumstances that removed her as trustee of his estate and effectively prevented her from filling that role could have been countered if funding had been available to set up a school of orgonomy, but it never was. I tried on several occassions to raise funding for orgonomic work, and setting up a venue for her to teach orgonomy was one of my top priorities, but I never was able to raise the money.

 

And now, with the de facto sequesturation of the Reich Archives apparently becoming permanent, much of the unique body of knowledge brought into being by Wilhelm Reich is apparently lost forever.

Science

The word "science" has come to mean something almost directly oposite to what it is suposed to mean. Science, in the modern sense of the natural sciences, is suposed to be the study of natural phenomena. In that sense, bird-watching is a scientific field of study. But in the last 100 years or so, "science" has almost reversed its meaning from the study of nature to the study of artificial, man-made phenomena which exist only in the laboratory or experimental set-up and are not found in nature.

 

The rise of a formal scientific culture with a set of admission requirements, a hierarchy of ranks, and rights and priviledges according to ones official standing has led to a set of standards that all scientific research must conform to, resulting in a systematized body of pseudoknowledge commonly called "scientific fact", but in reality, more like an official dogma.

 

I prefer the older form of science, the natural sciences, which can be investigated by studying nature, not by studying artificial phenomena in a sterile laboratory setting. There is no reason for a scientist, studying the natural world, to have any formal certification from anyone. Nobody has the right to say who is a scientist and who is not. And there is likewise no body of people who can dictate what form the study of the natural world can take.

 

In the old system of science, prior to about 1900 or so, someone like Van Leuenhoek, for example, could explore nature in his own way, at his own pace, and address the august Royal Society about his findings even thought he was a draper by trade. Every practicing medical doctor was also expected to publish his findings, based on his observations of his patients, not on controlled studies, in medical journals. A gentleman farmer like Thomas Jefferson could be a practicing scientist on his farm, like a former neighbor of mine who discovered a mash that would prevent poultry cancer and dug up dinosaur fosils on his chicken farm. He had the only combination chicken farm, dinosaur museum, and cancer research lab in the world.  

 

Today, nobody thinks something is science unless it conforms to the arbitrary and politicized standards of an official science cult. Despite the rationalizations that this ensures better quality control in findings which are to be diseminated as fact, the real purpose of this custom is to ensure the continued dominance of the hierachy of science.

 

And in the process, a lot of valid observations and real knowledge falls through the cracks, lost and forgotten because it was not discovered in the approved way by the approved people and was not formulated in the approved manner and published in the approved journals.

 

So, yes, I do call what I do "science". And the opinion of the scientific cultists does not interest me

The Croftian Devices

In one post sent out to his mailing list, James DeMeo claims he fought a cloudbuster war with a group of Croftians in his neighborhood who were causing a drought. He says he was able to eliminate the drought tendency they had created by constant operation of their pseudocloudbusters.   If he reversed a drought tendency, that is good and he deserves credit for it. But the question occurs to me, how does he know the Croftians caused it? In his published report, all he says is that they were operating in the vicinity and that their devices, which are usually left in position permanently, over-excite the atmosphere and cause droughts.   I have some doubts about this. The Croftian devices are static devices. They do not move. There are some reports in the orgonomic literature of ungrounded cloudbusters having an effect on weather while in motion, as when Robert McCullough reported that on his way to Arizon he saw clouds constantly forming and breaking up ahead of his truck.   But there is no reason to think an ungrounded cloudbuster would have an effect on weather if it was not moving.   There is also no reason to think a cloudbuster could continue to affect the atmosphere on a long-term basis if it was not moved from time to time. All experience indicates the cloudbuster stops drawing after a while of drawing from the same spot. The atmosphere becomes accustomed to the stimulus and stops responding to it. A cloudbuster set up to draw constantly from a single spot soon becomes inoperative. This is in fact, why the countless metal pipes that are accidently aimed at the sky in construction sites, etc. do not function as cloudbusters, at least not for long.   The Croftian devices are not cloudbusters. If they do anything at all, a claim of which I am still not convinced, they are orgone shooters, a strong orgone field with a conduit, either a straight pipe or a flexible tube, it does not matter, connected to it, so orgone is drawn out of the accumulator by the orgonomic potential of a stronger charge at the other end of the conduit.   I have used an orgone shooter to break up small cumulus clouds and jet aircraft contrails, but it only works with a bucket of water inside it. A pipe connected to an accumulator without any water involved does not provide a strong enough draw to noticeably affect the atmosphere, even for a small-scale, short-range operation like cutting a jet contrail in half, let alone cause a serious and long-lasting drought.   The Croft devices are composed of a resinous matrix with metal filings mixed into it. They are usually made by using a bucket as a mold, into which the mixture of resin and filings is poured and allowed to set. This is not an orgone accumulator, or at least not a very effective one, though it might have a field around it that could be detectable by a sensitive individual or by some sort of instrument.   But as a means of exciting the atmosphere, it does not seem very likely that it would be more of an excitation than almost any run-of-the-mill electrical device. Radio and television transmitters, radar, microwave, high-tension wires, and numerous other everyday apparatus are far more likelt to create a significant amount of oranur than a small, rather weak accumulator, with or without a pipe grounded into it.   I may be wrong. It might be that the Croft devices are affecting the weather in harmfull ways, just as James DeMeo thinks they are. But I suspect there is an ideological issue here as well. Blaming a drought on a gang of Croftian cultists playing around with orgonomic technology they do not understand may look better to James Demeo than blaming human civilization in general, and the wide-spread use of electrical technologies which most people assume are here to stay.   In numerous posts in recent years, Dr. DeMeo has seemed relectant to cast blame for droughts and other weather-related problems on the nuclear industry and its associated military nuclear weaponry, and has chosen instead to push the hypothesis that long-term natural cycles and changes in the output of the sun are the main, and perhaps the sole, reason for climate disruptions.   If he is trying to get the modern industrial civilization off the hook by blaming climate changes on natural cycles, he might be trying to get industrial civilization off the hook by blaming at least some droughts on Croftians monkeying with things as well.   Until somebody does some real research on the effectiveness of the Croft devices, we simply shall not know. But the result of my theoretical analysis is that the large-scale effects of the Croft devices are likely to be minimal at most.

A Freudian View of Global Warming

The current hysteria over the prospect of a warmer earth and ice-free poles is like the defense mechanism of a patient in psychotherapy who fears that which he should logically most welcome. It is due to reactivating the inherited trauma of the terrifying experience of the meteor bombardment which nearly wiped out life on earth. The descendents of the survivors of the climate-changing catastrophe, are suffering from a form of collective amnesia which causes them to react with dread to the thought of the return to the pre-catastrophe state, when the earth was a warmer and more pleasant place to live. 

 

But the environmentalists, who are in other situations the people most in touch with their instincts and feelings for life, are here being betrayed by that very closeness to emotional health. The mainstream human population is far more out of contact with their instincts and feelings and do not feel the same overwhelming anxiety about climate normalization because they are farther from health than the environmentalists are and the feelings are more repressed in them.

 

So the environmentalists are squandering effort on futile attempts to convert more repressed people to fear of the ancient catastrophe. Only the environmentalists are close enough to remembering the catastrophe to fear the memory of it. That is why people become environmentalists in the first place. Normal people, those in whom the ancient events are more deeply buried, have no fears of global disaster because they have repressed it too deeply, so they will never become environmentalists.

 

Meanwhile, real climate disasters, those being caused by the increasing oranurization of the earth by nuclear/electrical technology, are being ignored by the environmental movement and attention focused on unreal "threats" like melting polar ice packs.This is a perfect example of what Reich called "the evasion of the essential".

Dealing with Doubters

There is no point in the constant re-
> hashing of the same old thing over and over again.

>
> It is way past time to move beyond the issue of the existence of orgone

and deal with orgone the way other
> sciences deal with their subject matter, learning more about it as
> time goes on, not constantly stuck in trying to justify the existence
> of their science.
>
> Nobody asks astronomers to prove stars exist, or pesters nuclear
> physicists to prove radioactivity exists. Nobody keeps asking
> biologists to show that cells exist or demands that pathologists
> demonstrate the existence of germs every time they mention them.
> Anyone who brings up the question of if orgone really exists or not
> is not ever going to accept it no matter how much evidence is
> presented because the reason for compulsive doubting is defense, not
> lack of evidence.
>
> Anyone who keeps demanding more evidence and ignores that which has
> already been presented is suffering from a form of mental illness
> that ought to be called 'Stoicaism" after Ovidu Stoica, a compulsive doubter.
>
> So I refuse to get bogged down in trying to convert anyone. I
> am not a missionary for orgonomy or trying to save souls for Reich.
> If someone does not believe orgone exists I will talk to someone
> else. This blog should be for the people who know something about the
> subject to discuss advanced matters concerning it and for those who
> do not know much about it to learn.

Chembuster Video Review

I simply do not see what you are saying you see in this video. The device shown is an orgone shooter, as described by Reich in the 1940s. It consists of a small orgone accumulator with several hollow tubes leading from it. The ends of the tubes are pointed at the sky instead of at a patient, but that is the only difference.

 

 It would be expected to have a small short-range effect on small clouds for a limited period of time, until the atmosphere got used to the stimulus and quit reacting to it. The effect on the cloud depicted in the video is not the same as the effect of a cloudbuster, though there is a superficial resemblence that might look the same to someone who was not familiar with the orgonomic understanding of how a cloudbuster works.

 

The cloudbuster works by DRAWING energy down the tubes, and into the water the cloudbuster is grounded into. If it is aimed directly at a cloud, the cloud will break up because the energy is withdrawn from it. The draw is due to the attraction of water for orgone.

 

What is shown in this video is the over-excitation of a cloud by energy being drawn INTO it from the device because the cloud is MORE STRONGLY charged than the small accumulator at the end of the pipes. The orgonomic potential is at work here; the highly-charged water in the cloud DRAWS the orgone through the pipes into the cloud.

 

 The charge of the cloud INCREASES from the addition of charge until it exceeds the capacity of the small amount of water in the cloud. Then the expansion-causing tendency of orgone causes the water droplets to move apart, breaking up the cloud.

 

The cloud draws energy from the bucket via the pipes, and gets over-excited. It therefore breaks up from OVER-EXPANSION, not from withdrawal of energy. The resemblence is superficial.

 

The allegations of a beneficial effect on a DOR-atmosphere cannot be substanciated. Adding charge to a stagnant, DOR-infested area of the sky will not recycle the DOR into mobile OR. It will, however, if continued long enough, get the stagnant area so overcharged that a discharge will result.

 

 This discharge might take the form of heat, lightning, or a circulatory motor force, known popularly as a tornado. If heat waves, thunderstorms, or tornados were being caused very frequently by these devices, someone among the many hobbyists indulging in this sport would have noticed it by now, unless they are all so blinded by their implausable belief-system that none of them can see the connection.

 

But while that is certainly a possibility that must be kept in mind, the more likely reason none of them has noticed any such result is that these devices are not strong enough to have that much of an effect -at least not too much of the time.

 

The device depicted is not a cloudbuster, and would not have the effects of a cloudbuster. The confusion arises from the name, "cloudbuster" , and the common misperception that the function of a cloudbuster is to "break up clouds". It is not important that a common effect of a cloudbuster draw is the breaking up of a cloud. That is only one possible effect, and not even one of the most important ones.

 

If the cloudbuster was called an Orgone Drawing Device, or an Orgone Attractor, or an Orgonomic Atmospheric Modulator, or some other name that did not give people unfamiliar with it the impression that breaking up clouds is what it is for, this kind of error would not happen.  

 

But the name "cloudbuster" is there for historical reasons having to do with how it came to be invented, not what it does or what it is used for. And the people fooling around with these devices are not aware of that because they have no interest in learning orgone physics. They are interested in a role-playing game, and calling their devices "cloudbusters" and pretending they re-mobilize DOR is part of the game to them, just like pretending DOR is some chemical being sprayed out of airplanes is a part of the game they are playing.

 

And while they indulge themselves in such fantasies, people who want to know what is happening to the atmosphere and what to do about it are being tricked into getting involved in silly role-playing games instead of being able to learn the facts.

 

And that makes these people who play these silly games part of the problem.

More On Trevor Constable

In 1969-1972, Trevor Constable was employed by the ACO as their West Coast cloudbuster operator, doing many orops under ACO auspices, with their funding. He was nominally under Blasbands supervision, and was helped by a woman named Mary Poe, who was in therapy with Dr. Albert Duvall.

 

On one occasion, while Blasband was visiting, Constable did an operation to demonstrate a new cloudbusting technique he had developed. The success of the operation was documented by the news report next day: Storm Hikes State Death Toll To 67 on Rain-slicked Freeways.

 

On another occcasion, one of his orops was similiarly documented by a news headline: 9-year-old Boy Swept Out To Sea By Sudden, Unexpected Storm. Both of these news headlines were known to Blasband at the time, but there is no record that he ever raised any objection to this murder by cloudbuster with ACO funding and suport.

 

When I met Constable, in Dec., 1971, he told me Reich was not the real inventor of the cloudbuster, he was a re-incarnated Atlantean who remembered how the Atlanteans had used cloudbusters. He told me the cloudbuster used by the Atlanteans was exactly the same design, and they had fought a war with them which sank Atlantis. When I asked how he knew all this, he Said, "I'm clairvoyant" .

 

Constable told me he was an ocultist, urged me to read Rudolph Steiner, and said Reich was "blocked against mysticism". More to the point, he also said the way to convince people cloudbusting worked was to go for breaking the rainfall record everytime he operated. He said he was going to "bring storms into Los Angeles that would turn the place inside out".

 

Later, when I obtained documentation in the form of a letter in which he said the exact same thing, I showed the letter to Jerome Eden, who got very excited and sent it to Ellsworth Baker. The ACO had an emergency Board of Directors meeting and Constable was fired, but over the strong objections of Blasband, who argued that Constable did good work. Baker told me a short time after that, "I'm worried about Dr. Blasband".

 

Constable, according to his book, Loom of the Future, had been a campaign worker for the 1968 presidential campaign of George Walace, who ran on a racial segegation platform. That, along with his mysticism, was known to Blasband at the time.

 

Constable had formed a bad impression of me when I visted him because a Black friend of mine, Larry Diggs, a well-known San Francisco disk jockey, had gone along with me to see him. Constable was friendly and polite, but afterwards sent a letter to several orgonomists warning them I was "associating with Black magicians".

 

Mary Poe has told me that Constable had figured out how to direct a lightning strike with a cloudbuster and had demonstrated the technique. A short time later, when she had an argument with Constable and quit as his assistant, there was a tremendous unforecast thunderstorm that night, with numerous lightning strikes right near her home and none anywhere else. She is convinced he was trying to kill her. Since I have tested out the technique and confirmed that it works, I am inclined to believe her.

 

At the time Constable got fired from by the ACO, Blasband offered to resign from the ACO and go into the commercial cloudbusting business with him, but Constable told him to stay with the ACO so he could keep Constable informed of what the ACO was doing. In other words, Blasband was to become a spy in the ACO for Constable.

 

Blasband was angry at me for blowing the whistle on his friend, and when I asked him why he had not, as an orgonomist, considered Constables mysticism pathological, he said that Constable does good work and I was a biggot to hold the mans religion against him. It is not surprising that Blasband later became involved with another mystical guru, Levashov, and has come to believe in a mystical theory of the functioning of the cloudbuster instead of the orgonomic theory of Reich.

 

 That a mystical.minded person like Constable could be accepted by the ACO as fit to do cloudbusting is enough to raise questions about their competence as psychiatrists in itself, but that they had accepted for a highly responsible position, a position in which the lives of unsuspecting members of the public could be put at risk, a man who had worked for the election of a presidential candiate whose main issue was racial segregation, says all I need to know about the ACO. One must be very far to the right indeed to consider racism a respectable political position.

 

At the time, I was told by Ellsworth Baker that the next issue of the Journal of Orgonomy would contain an article explaining why Trevor Constable was no longer working for them. I am still waiting for that article. The ACO has never formally repudiated Constable, leaving people who do not have access to personal conversations with insiders to assume he is still connected with the ACO.