This book consists of exerpts from posts to the Orgonescience discussion list that existed on the internet from March 7th, 2006, to December 9th, 2007. In that time, 2101 messages were sent to the list, almost all of them by myself. When the list was discontinued, I was faced with the choice to either delete all that information, or preserve it in some way. The choice was made to preserve it, and this book that you are now about to read is the result.
Much of the material I sent to the list consisted of short commentaries on news items that suggested an orgonomic interpretation or pronouncements by members of other lists oriented to orgonomy with whom I disagreed. In the process of editing, much material was found to be dated or not relevant to a more general readership interested primarily in orgone biophysics, and not in the day-by-day incidents that often inspired comment. Much material has therefore been deleted as irrelevant for the purposes of this book. What remains is, I hope, what will be of interest, and possibly of use, to individuals with an interest in the scientific aspects of orgonomy, the science of the life energy founded by Wilhelm Reich between 1936 and 1957.
In 1987, after nearly 20 years of being intensely interested in orgonomy, having already done considerable cloudbusting work, having replicated most of the experiments published by Reich, and having confirmed his claims and results, I had a unique opportunity to attend a private seminar in Hancock, Maine, given by Dr. Eva Reich, the daughter and designated successor of Wilhelm Reich.
This seminar, for which we paid, was the only one she ever gave which was devoted entirely to orgone biophysics, not primarily to psychology and child-rearing methods, which were the major interests of most of her students. Only one other person, the late Jay Mikesell, attended, and since he is now dead, I am the sole surviving student of that course. 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 father’s work, I was the only one who asked the right questions.
Since the death of Jay Mikesell, I am left as the only person 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.”
We taped the whole thing, and I still have about 22 hours of the seminar on tape. If I ever get the money, I will have it transcribed and made into a book. And maybe someday, if anyone is interested, I will give a seminar and try to poass on some of that knowledge.
Much of the material I sent to the orgonescience list reflects that tutoring; much of it does not. I take full responsibility for everything I said in the posts that are now made available here.
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 occasions 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 sequestration of the Reich Archives apparently becoming permanent, much of the unique body of knowledge brought into being by Wilhelm Reich is apparently lost forever.
This list was never intended to be an on-line tutorial in orgone biophysics; it was supposed to be a forum for discussions on the scientific issues raised by the discoveries of Wilhelm Reich. But it is clear now what I should have known right from the start: there simply wasn't enough interest to sustain a list devoted solely to the scientific aspects of orgonomy.
I might think the dearth of interest was due to the fact that I was the moderator, except that the other Reichian discussion lists suffer from the same lack of activity. Both the Wilhelm Reich List and the Orgonomy Mailing List deal with a wide array of topics which have little or nothing in common except for the fact that they all were of interest to Wilhelm Reich at one time or another. The scientific aspects of orgonomy are the subject of only a small minority of the posts to those two lists.
Most of the material on those other lists consists of psychology, politics, conspiracy theories, sexuality, UFOs, free-energy claims, alternative sciences unrelated to the orgone discoveries of Reich, and biographical trivia about Reich. A large amount of space is devoted to details of publications and where to find them. There is endless discussion of almost everything except the essential--the factual discoveries which make orgonomy a reality-based science instead of a crackpot pseudoscientific cult.
My efforts to introduce a focus on orgonomic science into those lists were met with apathy from most of the members, and active opposition from a few individuals who obviously felt threatened by the subject matter. Those two or three people sabotaged every attempt to discuss orgone energy rationally. I thought that starting a new list, where I could control the content and prevent such disruption, would allow the people who wanted to discuss orgone energy to do so without distractions, but it seems there simply are not enough of them.
The orgonescience list in two years gathered only about 50 members, and only two or three of them had anything to say. Almost nobody showed much interest in anything I have said either. And, most important, nobody showed any interest in conducting and reporting any actual experimental work. I do not think this is a case of simple lack of interest. I think there is a psychological defense mechanism at work here, just as Reich described it. He called it "sitting on the spot,” and he described in detail in Listen, Little Man, the exact same phenomena among his followers in the 1940s.
I still have hopes that someday it will be possible to have some sort of meaningful discussions and cross-fertilization of ideas about orgone energy, but it looks right now as if an on-line mailing list just is not the right venue to go about it. Rather than allow the information in the list archive to be lost, it is now being presented in this form for whoever might be interested.
Since this was not originally written as a book, it is more a collection of short essays and letters, many of them in response to questions or comments from other list members, and many others as commentary on items in the daily news. Inevitably, it will seem disjointed and will skip from one topic to another and back again in places. For that, I appologize to the reader.
I would have liked to have written an organized systematic presentation of the material, placing each subject in some sort of proper order to facilitate understanding, but that would not have been possible without writing a whole new book from scratch. Someday, if there is enough interest, I may do that. But for now, this compilation, intended to preserve in an accessable form the information that came up in the course of the two-year history of the orgonescience list, will have to do.
