Stormy Weather


One of the most intriguing ideas I've heard lately was on public radio, probably a Terry Gross interview. I can't recall now the name of the author or the book. But one idea stayed with me: he challenged the idea that we can separate life from the conditions for life. Life isn't traveling around in a space ship looking for a home; it makes its own home.

Yesterday I started out to write about the weather, but I got sidetracked by a tedious man who was trying to show his credentials. I boosted him in the hallway. "Who sent you here?"

"Nobody sent me. I've always been here."

"Why haven't I seen you around before?"

"Because you hadn't been around before."

"Are you prepared to integrate?"

"I'll die first."

"Very well. Get on with it."

"Right. Okay. Let's take a step back and look at this situation. If I integrate who gets the energy? You? That's like robbery isn't it?"

"Murder and robbery, actually. Well, not murder so much as ritual sacrifice. I just make you feel so bad about yourself you die, like they do it in Voodooville."

I guess one of the conditions for life is inclusion. Sometimes I entertain ideas because they are so down at the heels and lacking in fashion sense they've forgotten how to entertain each other. For example, not long ago I talked to a woman who was at a recent conference in England, having to do with the theories of Wilhelm Reich.

The general consensus is that Reich was eccentric, to be kind, or a wing nut, to be clear. My own practice has always been to simply disregard what I can't use in somebody else's writings, and retain what I can use. So I had little knowledge about Reich other than some of his thoughts on the relationship between adhesions in the sacrum and neurosis. He wrote that the only way to reset the sacrum is with a full orgasm.

Somewhere I read that "sacrum" isn't Latin, but when I looked it appears to be Latin. I read that it came from the Egyptian, and means, "sacred bone." I may be passing along inaccuracies because of my laziness in not looking things up I read somewhere else.

That, however, is different from exploring information which has been locked out of the culture, convicted of fraud and deceit. Reich seems to carry the shadow of Freud's extended family. He was hauled off to jail for selling orgone accumulators. This is a lot like you being thrown in prison for selling Tarot Cards with an assurance that they could be used to contact an invisible knowledge. They can be and anybody who has used them while in an open emotional state knows that. The I Ching is similarly useful, but I doubt it comes with a disclaimer that it is for entertainment purposes only. The magic isn't in the cards until it is projected into them, at which point they can reflect back what is normally invisible.

What Reich said was that there is an invisible substance which he called orgone, and this article is the best one I've found which gives a logical presentation of Reich and of this life energy. It shows the progression of thought from a personal libido, or life force, toward the concept that the same force animates everything, including the atmosphere and its behaviors, or weather.

It is from this point of view some of Reich's followers began to experiment with devices which could gather and direct this orgone toward conscious effect. If you didn't read the linked article, orgone is just a name for the energy which animates, and is sometimes called Ki, libido, or the force. There's lots of names, but it's all the same energy. Blake said that the God of the Jews will be revealed as the one God because it is the animating force, or creative force. In the spiritual group I belong to, we call it the mystery. Don Juan called it intent.

Had the lady who showed me what a cloud buster looks like and how its supposed to operate, been a bestial woman, I would have paid no attention. But she was comely and pleasant, so I listened as if I believed somebody might make rain with one of those things. I would be more likely to believe a rain dance would do the trick. My thinking goes, "If I could make rain I wouldn't be looking for money; money would be looking for me."

The thing about this type of claim is that you can't prove it or disprove it. You set up a cloud buster and three days later you get a rain shower. Do you believe this little device had anything to do with it? If you're willing to finance one for your area, would you like to be on our mailing list? We have many investment opportunities which might interest you. Can we contact your friends?

Even if I wouldn't invest in something on anecdotal evidence of its doing something miraculous -- I don't go to church either -- I do like Eisenhower's method of making something bigger if I don't understand it. So I began to think about the concept of orgone energy, and the connection between direct transmission of information and sexual energy, which people in love know all about. I have no doubts at all that there is an energy in my body that is the same energy as animates other bodies. So maybe it is the same energy that animates plants, and, even the weather. Maybe rain dancers connect because they seduce the rain with their desire.

"Did you come yet?"

"Not yet. Don't stop dancing."

We know all the scientific reasons why the weather is changing. We know about what freon does to ozone and that factory farming of animals is destroying the water and the atmosphere. We know there are too many people and not enough habitat for other animals. We know the sky is crying and the wind moans because the moon has turned blood red above the wildfire. To understand rationally we remove the emotion. But I can't help wondering if that isn't like separating life from the conditions for life.

Sometimes I run across a piece of information that stays in my head. A long time ago I read someplace that there was a high percentage of homes in the American colonies with women locked in the cellars. The women were going mad, and had to be contained. This was interesting to me because it was the Age of Reason blooming into the Age of Enlightenment. Whether it was the empiricists with physical sciences or the rationalists with mathematics, there was no room for witchy bullshit.

Part of the Enlightenment was the equality of mankind, and trailing along behind as usual, the equality of humankind, and bringing up the rear, living kind. It was the elevation of the concept of individual equality which caused the downfall of Anton Mesmer. So long as he thought that the life force doing the healing came from outside himself, he was okay. But when he concluded that the force couldn't be separated from him, and was coming through him, he was denounced as a charlatan by a panel of esteemed examiners which included Benjamin Franklin.

Reich's downfall was in more or less the same pattern. He was arguing for something which was invisible and which he couldn't prove exists, just as a body worker or a martial arts master can't prove there's such a thing as chi, but they both know nothing happens when it isn't directed. Reich was thrown in prison over his claims for his orgone accumulator, but one has to wonder if it wasn't for suggesting that a good rogering will cure what ails you.

I always thought the mad woman in the cellar was the perfect counterpoint to the Age of Reason. Chaos has been separated away from the divine mind of man.

"Here, go feed your mama."

"What if she gets out?"

"Just slide the tray through the slot like I showed you."

At any rate, when I began reading the introduction to, "Transformation of the Psyche," I hit a piece of information that I had never heard before. It was that during the Dark Ages in Europe, the weather matched the emotional regression. "While culture was flourishing in the Islamic world, Europe experienced hundreds of years of unusually frigid weather, storms, floods, famines, war, plague and epidemics."

There was also this bit of information: "More Christians died at the hands of the Church than had died during the persecution by pagan Romans prior to Constantine's conversion. The Crusades took some of the warfare out of Europe, but as late as 1204, when the Fourth Crusade failed to reach the Holy Land, its army sacked Constantinople and massacred its citizens."

In the Arab world alchemy was likewise flourishing. It was an investigation of the transformation of matter from a dark state to a pure state, represented by gold, or by the philosopher's stone. If you look at the process just rationally, it seems stupid to believe you could make pure gold out of base metals. But if you expand it, you get a different picture, of an internal process being projected into an external process.

At that time, the Shi'ites were not fundamentalists. They valued direct inner experience and interpreted the Quar'an symbolically. The Sunni, on the other hand, thought the book was to be interpreted literally as the word of the prophet. Later on the Ismaelites were broad minded enough to consider that although Mohammed was a major prophet, he was not the only one, and truth can be found in all religions.

But what stuck in my head was the coincidence of bad weather and social disintegration. It got me to thinking about the idea of the planet itself as being a living thing, which we can't relate to because, at the foundation of our thinking, we think our life force is different from what is above us, and below us. If we related to the energy that animates cows as the same energy that animates us, we might not think of them as a crop to be harvested.

I wouldn't present this idea as factual, nor would I defend it with reason. It's different from that. It belongs more in the realm of poetry, or storytelling and mythologizing. There's something appealing about there being a substance that is the same thing no matter what it animates, because it opens me intellectually to the possibility that wireless communication is an externalization of an internal process.

"Hey, little lady, my name's Ogone."

"I'm chi chi."

"Looks like we're in for some weather, eh?"

Posted: Sat - September 22, 2007 at 11:40 AM