posted October 11, 2009 01:27 PM
An extract of a piece written by Charles R. Kelley, Ph.D. Perhaps the most perceptive of Reich's insights was the realization that
there are forces in human nature which blocked the discovery of Orgone
energy. It is these forces which in the past distorted and then buried the
work of men like Mesmer, Reichenbach and Tesla to name just a few. It is
the same forces today which not only prevent the serious study by
scientists of the concept of Orgone energy and many other free
technologies that would benefit the world, but in fact bring about attempts
of every possible kind by a vicious minority to destroy the concept and
those who support it. The pathological nature of these attacks is shown by
their extraordinary and otherwise inexplicable virulence.
Orgone energy is not studied seriously by most scientists because
scientists, like other people, suffer from the mass biological disorder which
Reich described in detail, and which forms perhaps his greatest
contribution to science.
The human race is sick en mass, severely sick. The Christian religion
expresses an understanding of this sickness in the concept of original sin.
If we examine the world around us, we see that it might easily be a world of
plenty. There are techniques and resources to satisfy nearly every human
need, enough for every individual to lead a useful, happy, and productive
life -- yet this world is dominated by wars and threat of war, by irrational
politics, in many countries taking the form of extremist far left or far right.
Within countries crime and mental illness are prevalent; about one
American in ten at one time or another spends time in an institution, and
only a small percentage of those who are mentally ill ever reach an
institution.
Man is sick en mass, and the sickness is rooted in his structure, a
structure which, for some reason, has become biologically rigid. This
rigidity is shown primarily by a chronic muscular tension which Reich called
armor. Armor affects most of the human race throughout all the continents.
The variations in type and degree of armoring are legion, but almost every
human being is armored to some extent.
The effect of armor is to block or restrict the flow of Orgone energy in
through the bio energy field or aura to the body, and in consequence, to
block or limit the emotion rooted in this energy flow. Armor limits the
capacity to experience and express deep feeling. It destroys the capacity
for a natural sexuality, the most intense pleasurable emotion. The amour
shapes the character and mentality; it affects how people think, including
how scientists think. Armor is the cause of psychosis, of crime, of
extremists in Politics and Religion and of other political irrationality. It is the
root of contradiction between mechanism and mysticism, which is so
important to understanding resistance to the Orgone energy concept.
Our civilization is rooted in mystical religion and mechanistic science.
These together comprise the principal intellectual forces in the world we
live in. Both of these forces are products of armored man. Reich has said
that mankind is ruled by a contradictory and murderous mixture of
machines and gods, by which he meant the mystical forces of religion and
the mechanistic forces of science. The mechanist armors himself in such a
way that he cuts off his perception of and his contact with his own deepest
nature. He becomes rigid and limited in his thought processes. He
develops a mechanical concept of nature and becomes deterministic in his
view of causality. He tends to think compulsively and has a deep-seated
fear of the alive, the free, the spontaneously moving, the unpredictable and
the deeply emotional. The mechanistic scientist reacts against Orgone
energy functions because they correspond to exactly that portion of nature
that he has armored against. For this reason, the mechanist forms a
mechanical view of creation and of life.
The mystic, by contrast, is not completely cut off from his nature, from
Orgone energy phenomena within himself, but has distorted this contact
because of his armor. The mystic is capable of achieving some great
insights because he is in partial contact with his deepest nature; still his
contact, especially his contact with his own body, is distorted, and in most
cases, deeply distorted. The mystic tends to split off bodily love from the
mental, the "spiritual, " and often to become ascetic and anti-sexual. This is
perhaps the greatest tragedy of all, because it contributes the most to
reproducing armor in the young.
A split perception of mind and body develops in the mystic, so that the
mind seems to him capable of existing in nature in the absence of the
body. Along with this the mystic tends to develop a magical view of
causality. And the mystic, of course, forms a mystical or magical view of
creation and life revolving about "spirit, " or "god, " which is out of contact
with real physical processes. It is this view which the mystic finds most
threatened by the concept of Orgone energy. Recognition of the real
tangible creative process as expressed in Orgone energy functions
threatens the mystic's concept of god as an intangible, essentially
unknowable entity.
The relation between mechanism, mysticism, and what
Reich termed "orgonomic functionalism. " Reich defined orgonomic
functionalism as the natural way of thinking by the unarmored. The armor
distorts natural thinking in the mechanistic or mystical direction. Both
mechanistic and mystical thinking find functional thought processes
foreign. Interestingly, mechanists are apt to regard them as mystical;
mystics, as mechanistic.
The predominant forces in our civilization are by their nature in opposition
to the Orgone energy concept. It will hardly be sufficient to show how deep-
seated and powerful these forces are, nor to show the extreme hatred and
fear that can arise from them; this is hard to believe until it is experienced
personally, but to the skeptic, let me remind him that Reich's publications
were burned and banned on the flimsiest of pretexts by an agency of the
United States Government, that Reich himself died in a United States
prison although entirely innocent of wrong-doing, and that Reich and his
work have always been subject to the most incredible attacks, involving
defamation, vilification, and gross distortions of facts.
Not everyone, not even a majority react maliciously to the Orgone energy
concept. In fact, most people don't know enough about it to have an inkling
of what it really is. Those threatened by the concept have largely
succeeded in preventing others from investigating the evidence that exists
about it. If the concept is sufficiently ridiculed and defamed, if the scientific
reputations of those who support the concept are destroyed, if the work
that has been carried out in the field is made to seem absurd and
undeserving of serious study, then the concept of Orgone energy can be
carefully buried again, as it has been so many times in the past. There is
then no necessity for scientists to examine the evidence, to repeat the
experiments, or to contend with the carefully thought out and consistent
scientific writing the field contains. There will always be "experts" who will
lend their authority to the burial by declaring the work unworthy of serious
consideration.
Lindaland
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posted October 11, 2009 01:27 PM
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