I know a discussion of this is going on in another thread, but I thought I'd make a fresh one before asking my questions as that one has gotten more than a bit off of its original topic... This is aimed particularly at Taiji Butterfly because he seems to be researching the idea, but anyone else is welcome to contribute opinions/experiences. I've read before the idea that "orgone" energy is what qi actually is in a scientific sense... but when you do a websearch for "orgone energy" there is a disturbingly large amount of questionable looking stuff popping up with it... but I have an open mind. I also noticed that a number of people are online selling "orgone chambers," "orgone blankets," and the like. These things supposedly generate orgone energy, which has effects like speeding healing, etc. My question then is: has anyone who practices qigong actually purchased one of these things? If so, does it work? Does it create a sensation like one experienced when practicing qigong? I mean, if an experienced qigong practitioner were to say, "wow, when I inhale inside this little chamber thingy I get so much more qi going to my dantian," then that would give a lot more credence to the orgone theory in my mind. I personally can't afford one of these things and know with my luck it would end up just being a snake-oil piece of junk... nonetheless, I am curious. Does anyone own or have any experience with one of these orgone machines?
Don't worry... I'm not here to dog you're history. I too read some of the 'Reich' stuff in the qi thread. I'm still reading up on it. At any rate - what I've found may be of some interest to you. 1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich A comprehensive introduction to Wilhem Reich and his life and works. Gives you enough in a nutshell to be able to get your head around his basic ideas and the era in which he was working. 2) A bibliography of his works and books related to Wilhem Reich: source: www.Wikipedia.com The Wikipedia page also has a massive listing of external links. Well worth checking into if you want more info.
If you're interested in Reich, the best place to start is his book "Listen up little man." As far as Orgone, personally I'm not a believer. And there are lot of people who've had real issues with the Reich and Neo-Reich movement and compare it with Scientology. - Matt
Hawkwind - Orgone Accumulator I've got an Orgone Accumulator It makes me feel greater I'll see you sometime later When I'm through with my Accumulator It's no social integrator It's a one man isolator It's a back brain stimulator It's a cerebral vibrator Those energy stimulators Turn your eyeballs into crators But an Orgone Accumulator Is a superman creator It's no social integrator It's a one man isolator It's a back brain stimulator It's a cerebral vibrator I've got an Orgone Accumulator And it makes me feel grater I'll see you sometime later When I'm through with my Accumulator
I nominate adouglasmhor's post as the greatest post ever. Orgones... seriously, WTF is going on in IMA? Just to add something interesting to the discussion, I seem to remember a section in Sun Lu Tang's book on xingyi about hw after focusing his qi into his dantien his genitals became swollen and sensitive (erect?) and after a bit they "shrank" (?!?!?!?!?!?!)... I can't find the exact quote, but it's one of the stranger qi related things I've read by a respected master of neija. I'd always wondered if this perhaps had to do with the neigung. There's a lot of work going on in the lower abdomen, perhaps some of it massages the prostate? Regardless, I'm gonna stand santi for a while tonight, and I don't expect it to happen to me.
Best post on MAP ever - just coz it's Hawkwind (and I quoted it all because you can't quote Hawkwind often enough imo!!! :Angel: :Alien: :Alien: :Alien: :Angel:
Orgone generator The original orgone generator design was constructed from alternating layers of sheet metal and wood. Each metal layer was separated from the others by the wood spacers. One sits in the box about the size of an outhouse and supposedly the chi type energy builds up inside the box due to the design. Nikolas Tesla for example patented a design whereby a metal plate would accumulate a charge from environmental background magnetism enough to provide a small current into a grounding rod. Seems there may be something to this 'subtle energy' design. For more information check out Lakhovsky's experiments with healing cancerous bacteria in plants using just a insulated metal ring in the 1920's. He later developed the multiple wave oscillator, which he supposedly used to help heal some people in the 1930's. Dr. Robert O. Becker, Dr. Valerie Hunt, and Dr. William Tiller are good modern resources for researching 'subtle energy'. p.s. Reich also invented the even more outrageous "cloud buster".
Which prompted the equally outrageous and thoroughly wonderful Kate Bush to write the song "Cloudbusting"... The plot thickens....
Really, that for real? If so then I love the guy, I am going to dig up his corpse and give him a kiss!! **edit** Well blow me over, so it is! Never put two and two together!
On to Orgone Energy though, found this interesting article. I have highlighted the bits that amazed me. From "Hermit Scientists" by Martin Gardner (1951) Reprinted in Gardner's Science: Good, Bad and Bogus (1981) Reprinted here without permission Let us turn to a more colorful scientist whose work has recently become a lively cult among the more Bohemian intellectuals of New York and elsewhere -- the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich. Like Hubbard's dianetics, Reich's "orgone therapy" has no connection with religious dogma but is presented simply as a revolutionary discovery in biology and psychology. Reich began his curious career in Austria as an orthodox Freudian but later broke with the psychoanalysts, founding his own publishing house in Germany in 1931. He also severed his ties with the Austrian Communist Party, having served in the same cell with the writer Arthur Koestler. Five years later, Reich opened an institute at Oslo, where he met with furious attack by Scandinavian biologists who insisted his knowledge was less than that of an undergraduate. Expelled from Norway, he came to New York in 1939 at the invitation of Dr. Theodore P. Wolfe, an associate professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, and lectured for a brief term at New York's New School for Social Research. [Later, he maintained] a press in Greenwich Village, and research laboratories in Forest Hills, New York, and Organon, Maine. In Reich's best-known work, The Function of the Orgasm, he compares himself to Peer Gynt, i.e., the unconventional genius, out of step with society, misunderstood, ridiculed. Society has the last laugh, he writes, until the Peer Gynts are proved right. In [another] publication, Listen, Little Man, 1949, Reich likens himself to such persecuted figures as Jesus and Karl Marx. "Whatever you have done to me or will do to me in the future," he declares, "whether you glorify me as a genius or put me in a mental institution, whether you adore me as your savior or hang me as a spy, sooner or later necessity will force you to comprehend that *I have discovered the laws of the living*.. ." A pamphlet by Dr. Wolfe, published by Reich's Orgone Institute in 1948, is called Emotional Plague Versus Orgone Biophysics. The purpose of the booklet is stated on the cover: "A vicious campaign of slander and distortion against Wilhelm Reich and his work was begun early in 1947. There is no telling where it will lead. This campaign has not been confined to magazine and newspaper articles, but an agency of the United States Government has been dragged into it." Chief signs of this "emotional plague" (Reich's term for the slander campaign) are two articles by Mildred Brady, one in Harper's (April, 1947), the other in The New Republic (May 26, 1947). The government agency is the Food and Drug Administration, at that time investigating Reich's "orgone accumulators." These are large boxes of wood on the outside and metal inside. Patients rent them from the Institute, then sit inside them to build up their orgone potential by absorbing the box's abnormally high concentration of orgone energy (a nonelectromagnetic radiant energy coming from outer space which Reich discovered in Norway in 1939). "The Orgone Accumulator is the most important single discovery in the history of medicine, bar none," Wolfe writes. The following paragraph from a letter of Reich's published in the pamphlet, is revealing: "It is an old story. It is older than the ancient Greeks whom we consider the bearers of a flourishing culture.. .. It was no different two thousand years later. Giordano Bruno, who fought for scientific knowledge and against astrological superstition, was condemned to death by the Inquisition. It is the same psychic pestilence which delivered Galileo to the Inquisition, let Copernicus die in misery, made Leeuwenhoek a recluse, drove Nietzsche into insanity, Pasteur and Freud into exile. It is the indecent, vile attitude of contemporaries of all times. This has to be said clearly once and for all. One cannot give in to such manifestations of the pestilence." A word about orgone energy. Reich regards his discovery of it as comparable to the Copernican Revolution. A failure to accept it on the part of other psychiatrists is, of course, "resistance to a new concept." In Character Analysis he interprets Freud's "Id" as the action of orgone energy in the body. The energy provides a biological and physical base for psychiatry, and to operate with the old Freudian drives is, Reich asserts, like trying to drink from a mirror image of a glass of water. In The Function of the Orgasm he describes orgone energy as blue in color (it has been photographed on Kodachrome film, Wolfe tells us), and adds that it is responsible for the Northern Lights, St. Elmo's Fire, lightning, the blue of the sky, electric disturbances during sunspot activity, and the blue coloration of sexually excited frogs. "Cloud formations and thunder storms," he writes -- "phenemena which to date have remained unexplained -- depend on changes in the concentration of atmospheric orgone." In 1947 Reich measured the energy with a Geiger counter. It is interesting to note in passing that Reich also attributes the flickering of stars to orgone energy. Reich's most astounding discovery is reported in the article "The Natural Organization of Protozoa from Orgone Energy Vesicles," in the November, 1942, issue of his International Journal of Sex Economy and Orgone Research. In this paper, accompanied by microphotographs, Reich describes his observations of protozoa being formed spontaneously from aggregates of bions. The bion is another Reich discovery. It is the unit of living matter, consisting of a membrane surrounding a liquid and pulsating with orgone energy. Bions are constantly being formed in nature by the disintegration of both organic and inorganic matter. Under his microscope Reich observed bions grouping together to form various types of protozoa, and he has the photographs to prove it. Cancer cells, incidentally, are protozoa which develop from tissue bions. To charges of critics that protozoa get into his cultures from the air, or were already on the disintegrating material in the form of dormant cysts, Reich simply answers that it isn't so, though he gives no evidence of taking adequate precautions against either possibility. Disciples of Reich frequently defend him by saying, "Granted that his biological work is highly suspect, you'll have to admit he's made great contributions to the field of mental therapy." This may be true. But it has somewhat the same plausibility as a statement like the following: "Granted that Professor Ludwig von Hoofenmeister errs in his theory that stars are holes in an opaque sphere surrounding the earth, you'll have to admit has has made magnificent discoveries in his study of cosmic rays." The reader may wonder why a competent scientist does not publish a detailed refutation of Reich's absurd biological speculations. The answer is that the informed scientist doesn't care, and would, in fact, damage his reputation by taking the time to undertake such a thankless task. For the same reasons, scarcely a single classic in the field of modern scientific curiosa has prompted an adequate reply. [In the book Gardner adds a postscript, written in 1981:] Reich's orgonomy cult *seems* to be waning (I could be wrong!), though most of his books are back in print, and his followers are still to be found among writers, artists, and show people like Orson Bean. Numerous books about him, favorable and otherwise, have been written in recent years. His daughter Eva Reich, a pediatrician in Hancock, Maine, is active as a lecturer in orgonomy. Her father's rain-making device -- huge tubes that squirt orgone energy into the clouds -- is in her front yard. For a while she was using orgone energy accumulators to treat infants at a hospital for premature babies in Harlem; but, after the director asked her to cease or resign, she chose the latter. Eva is firmly persuaded that human auras are orgone energy. See Lynn Franklin's long, sad interview, "Like Father, Like Daughter," in the Maine Sunday Telegram, June 22, 1980. According to Newsweek (December 13, 1976): "For twenty years, Eva Reich has been hiding microfilms of portions of Reich's papers in a mushroom cave in the Catskill Mountains. Unless the courts intervene, she says, she may make these secrets available to the world." So we have a man with a Martyr complex who claims his amazing life energy is responsible for natural wonders like lightning and the northern lights? C'mon...
(my italics) C'mon... I smell bovine excreta in that statement! The article quoted is heavily biased and shows Reich in a negative light based on quotes taken out of context imo. I have read 'Listen Little Man' several times and am working on 'Function of the Orgasm' currently - I see no foundation to the accusation levelled in either work tbh YES much of his research has been disproven or superceded - but much of it also has not! To fold your arms and say: 'I don't care' is hardly the attitude of a supposedly 'objective' scientist, is it? :Alien: Reich was heavily persecuted wherever he attempted to conduct his research, but he certainly did not have a martyr complex - he was simply responding to his critics and persecutors. Reich was a very sincere and creative maverick in a world of repressed cynics, way ahead of his time and in many ways should be recognised as a pioneer. Without his stimulus, many later (and some would say greater) researchers might never have started their work. He is similar to Freud in this respect imo - though much of his work was flawed and is now discounted, he nevertheless began the modern study of psychoanalysis and should be applauded for that. His original efforts gave birth to the many schools of psychotherapy and psychology that now exist. I see Reich in a similar light: a flawed human being who sincerely challenged an aspect of existence and stimulated others to challenge and question as a result. :Angel:
