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Wilhelm Reich, Orgone Energy, Dark Matter and Spontaneous Generation

Wilhelm Reich had a theory that a life energy, what he called orgone energy, permeated the universe. He invented a device called an orgone accumulator to  concentrate this energy and then a person could sit inside it and reap the healthful benefits. He claimed that it could cure disease and make a person more healthy, vital and full of energy. Later outgrowths of his work were bioenergetics, Rolfing and primal therapy. Reich never claimed that orgone energy was a precursor of life or that it gave rise to life. Other related claims for life energy or spiritual energy are the Chinese concept of qi or chi, the Indian Chakra, the Japanese concept of Reiki. There are also many other related concepts.

Charles Darwin invented neither the concept of evolution nor the concept of the "spontaneous generation" of life. Others before him including Lamarck also believed in it.

Darwin was not the first to develop a theory of evolution. More than 50 years before him the French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed that the various species had not been created in their current forms all at once, as was commonly believed, but had evolved through time by natural processes. He also embraced the principle of spontaneous generation propounded by Aristotle: Living things came into being directly from nonliving matter. Lamarck supposed this occurred on a minute scale unobservable to human eyes.

The general idea is that life had to come into being from non-life or be spontaneously generated. Another term for this is abiogenesis. This theory as well as others are concerned with the origin of life on earth from a primal soup. None of these theories postulate a universal life energy that permeates the entire universe and is a precursor for the development of life wherever circumstances are propitious such as on the planet Earth. The purpose of this blog entry is to propose such a universal precursor, and, I think, proof of it would have to be sought at the quantum level. Is there such a field as quantum biology? That's what I'm proposing. In fact it might be related to the dark mass/energy which makes up a considerable part of the universe and has physicists stymied. There may be some particle of mass/energy similar to a quark which is ubiquitous in the universe (as is microwave background radiation) and is capable of combining with "physical" particles such as quarks and electrons to form elementary life forms. Nothing like this has ever been observed because biologists are only looking at the molecular level. They need to be looking at a level many orders of magnitude smaller, the level of quantum physics rather than the level of molecular biology.

Physicists have yet to observe a Higgs boson or a graviton although they think they know so much about the fundamental particles. They have no idea what dark matter or energy is. If you have a scientific mentality, you would have to believe that life is capable of not only existing anywhere in the universe where conditions are favorable, but could come into being by natural means anywhere in the universe. For that to be the case, there must be one or more precursors that are ubiquitous and I speculate that they would be similar to the fundamental particles and might be incorporated into the Standard Model, which is a listing of all the particles and forces known to physicists.

Strictly speaking, the term particle is a misnomer because the dynamics of particle physics are governed by quantum mechanics. As such, they exhibit wave-particle duality, displaying particle-like behavior under certain experimental conditions and wave-like behavior in others (more technically they are described by state vectors in a Hilbert space; see quantum field theory). Following the convention of particle physicists, we will use "elementary particles" to refer to objects such as electrons and photons, with the understanding that these "particles" display wave-like properties as well. All the particles and their interactions observed to date can be described by a quantum field theory called the Standard Model. The Standard Model has 40 species of elementary particles (24 fermions, 12 vector bosons, and 4 scalars), which can combine to form composite particles, accounting for the hundreds of other species of particles discovered since the 1960s. The Standard Model has been found to agree with almost all the experimental tests conducted to date. However, most particle physicists believe that it is an incomplete description of Nature, and that a more fundamental theory awaits discovery. In recent years, measurements of neutrino mass have provided the first experimental deviations from the Standard Model.

I suggest that physicists incorporate the investigation of life at the level of quantum mechanics so that the Standard Model would include not only all the physical forces such as gravitation and electromagnetism and particles such as quarks and bosons but a "precursor of life" mass/energy as well. Maybe this is what makes up dark matter and energy. And Wilhelm Reich, although he never made the connection between orgone energy and spontaneous generation, deserves a posthumous apology from the federal government which incarcerated him, banned his literatrure and destroyed his orgone accumulators. He died in federal prison in 1957. One of the things I'm proudest of is that in the late 1960s a group of us, who published the San Diego Free Press, also obtained a copy of Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism (from Canada) when it was still banned in the US and published and distributed a number of copies. The Mass Psychology of Fascism is especially relevant today in light of the character structure of the Bush Asdministration.

In February 1954, the FDA filed a Complaint for Injunction against Reich in the Federal Court in Portland, Maine. The Complaint declared that orgone energy does not exist, and asked the Court to prohibit the shipment of accumulators in interstate commerce and to ban Reich’s published literature which they claimed was labeling for the accumulators. After considerable thought and discussion of this matter, Reich responded with a lengthy letter to Judge John Clifford, explaining that he could not appear in Court, since doing so would allow a Court of law to judge basic scientific research. He wrote: “Scientific matters can only be clarified by prolonged, faithful bona fide observations in friendly exchange of opinion, never by litigation... Man’s right to know, to learn, to inquire, to make bona fide errors, to investigate human emotions must, by all means, be safe, if the word FREEDOM should ever be more than an empty political slogan. Furthermore, Reich asserted, if his painstakingly elaborated and published findings “...over a period of 30 years could not convince this administration, or will not be able to convince any other administration of the true nature of the discovery of the Life Energy, no litigation in any court anywhere will ever help to do so. I, therefore, submit, in the name of truth and justice that I shall not appear in court as the ‘defendant’ against a plaintiff who by his mere complaint already has shown his ignorance in matters of natural science.” Judge Clifford did not accept Reich’s letter as a valid legal response, and on March 19, 1954, a Decree of Injunction was issued on default as if Reich had never responded at all. But the Injunction itself was even more excessive than the initial Complaint: it ordered orgone energy accumulators and their parts to be destroyed it ordered all materials containing instructions for the use of the accumulator to be destroyed it banned a list of Reich’s books containing statements about orgone energy, until such time that all references to orgone energy were deleted After the initial shock, Reich continued his research, traveling to Arizona to experiment with the cloudbuster in the dry desert environment. While he was there, and without his knowledge, one of Reich’ students—Dr. Michael Silvert—moved a truckload of accumulators and books from Rangeley, Maine to New York City, a direct violation of the Injunction. As a result, the FDA charged Reich and Silvert with criminal contempt of court. Following a jury trial, both men were found guilty on May 7, 1956. Reich was sentenced to two years in federal prison, Silvert was sentenced to a year and a day. The Wilhelm Reich Foundation—founded in Maine in 1949 by students and friends to preserve Reich’s Archives and to secure the future of his discovery of the Cosmic Life Energy—was fined $10,000. While Reich appealed his sentence, the government carried out the destruction of orgone accumulators and literature. In Maine, several boxes of literature were burned, and accumulators and accumulator materials either destroyed or dismantled. In New York City, on August 23, 1956, the FDA supervised the burning of several tons of Reich’s publications in one of the city’s garbage incinerators, including titles that were only to have been banned. Among the materials burned were: Orgone Energy Bulletin (12,189 copies) International Journal of Sex Economy and Orgone Research (6,261 copies) Emotional Plague Versus Orgone Biophysics (2,900 copies) Annals of the Orgone Institute (2976 copies) The Oranur Experiment (872 copies) Character Analysis Cosmic Superimposition Ether, God, and Devil Listen, Little Man People in Trouble The Cancer Biopathy The Function of the Orgasm The Mass Psychology of Fascism The Murder of Christ The Sexual Revolution This destruction of literature constitutes one of the most heinous examples of censorship in United States history. On March 8, 1957, Reich signed his Last Will and Testament. Among its stipulations was the establishment of The Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund as the legal entity charged with operating Orgonon as The Wilhelm Reich Museum; protecting, preserving, and transmitting his scientific legacy to future generations; and safeguarding Reich’s Archives. All appeals denied, on March 12, 1957—two weeks shy of his 60th birthday—Wilhelm Reich was temporarily incarcerated at the Danbury Federal Penitentiary in Connecticut. On March 22, he was taken to the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He died there of heart failure on November 3, 1957, and was buried at Orgonon.

Meta Evolution

Meta evolution has been defined in different ways. My definition would be the study of evolution as a function of different environments. It could be a comparative study, for example, of two different environments and the different life forms that hypothetically might have evolved there. For instance, what different lifeforms would have an advantage on a planet larger than earth that had relatively larger land masses and smaller oceans? There must be billions of planets in the universe similar to ours and dissimilar to ours. The Laws of Evolution must apply on these other planets as well. So how might life have evolved under different circumstances?

Let's consider a planet that has large fertile grasslands. Would grazing animals be ascendant? And what determines whether carnivores, herbivores or omnivores evolve. If there were large grasslands, would this predispose the evolution of herbivores. What conditions favor the evolution of predators? Scarce resources? Are there planets where there are no predators because conditions aren't right for the evolution of predators? Would there be peaceful coexistence among all life forms on such a planet? Are people who live in environments where there is plentiful food just for the taking and climactic conditions don't require much in the way of clothing and shelter more peaceful than people who live in environments where food is scarce and clothing and shelter are no trivial matters? Are such people more warlike?

I submit that, despite the relative scarcity or abundance of the natural resources necessary to sustain life, advanced life forms will commoditize and commercialize everything and anything including land, animals, plants, manufactured goods, precious metals and gems. Obviously, some land is more desirable than other land, some gems more valuable than other gems. When Europeans came to America, one of the first things they did was to commodify the land. Surveyors were in demand. Native Americans had lived here without land being bought or sold. This doesn't mean that there was no territorialness among the Indians. Land just wasn't a commmodity. There  was plentiful land and wild plant and animal resources compared to the number of human inhabitants. Europeans were used to turning land into a commodity or real estate with each parcel having a private owner who possessed a title or a piece of paper giving a legal description of the land and giving him rights of ownership thereto. The legal description could be verified and attested to by a surveyor.

In societies that had adopted agriculture and animal husbandry, land, animals and plants (such as bushels of wheat) became commodities to be bought and sold and fought over. Hunter gatherers had less to fight over as real wealth couldn't be accumulated in a hunter gatherer society in which people led a nomadic existence moving from place to place as conditions changed. So it may very well be true that the commoditization of society leads to more warfare. However, not all native peoples were peace loving. There's more to fight over than natural resources. There's human resources. Men fight over women and vice versa. People fight in order to take slaves. People fight over ideas. More wars have been fought in the name of religion than anything else although World War II was fought over ideology.

In the final analysis predation or war doesn't have that much to do with environmental conditions. It has more to do with the inability of sufficiently intelligent life forms to cooperate, to have empathy for each other and to be willing to limit their self-centeredness in the interests of the community at large. It has to do with insufficient methods for conflict resolution. Any sufficiently evolved and intelligent life form will generate conflicts over natural and human resources, over anything that can be commodified, over human resources in one form or other and over religion in one form or other. These conflicts are intensified as the ratio of number of people to the amount of resources increases, but they are still there in primitive societies including animal societies.

The drama of evolution is that the more intelligent the life forms that are produced, the more likely it is that they will self-extinguish. Alligators have been around for 250 million years making them very successful as a species. Neanderthal man was around for 250,000 years and was probably the victim of species-cide at the hands of homo sapiens, a more intelligent species. Homo sapiens has only been around 150,000 years and in that relatively short time has developed the capability for self-destruction either by virtue of the fact of having harnessed the atom or by his capacity for destroying the environment. Most life forms on earth eventually become extinct. The success of a species can be measured by its longevity. It would seem that the more intelligent the species, the less likely it is to be successful unless it can find an alternative to war.

Spontaneous Generation

This argument about whether evolution proceeded by random genetic mutations or whether there was some guidance which produced an "intelligent design" begs the question 'how did life start in the first place?'. If you're in the scientific mode, you have to believe that there is some process inherent in the universe which, under the right conditions, can generate life. This is what Darwin and others meant by "spontaneous generation." If you accept spontaneous generation, you also must accept the fact that life can start - and then evolve - anywhere in the universe and is not unique to earth. The whole question of God's role in all this is basically moot if you think about it. It boils down to 'Did God create life and then guide it's evolution?' or 'Did God create the universe with an inherent process for generating life and then evolving it." The latter would presage a more clever God than the former but the religiosos want to hold onto an anthropomorphic God, one who makes things and then places them on the earth much as a modelmaker would make a model and then place it on a display.

The real question is 'Does evolution proceed strictly by random genetic mutation or is there another process (involving God or not) which comes into play than pure randomness? Darwin, Lamarck and others believed there was. They believed that characteristics developed during an individual's lifetime could be genetically transmitted to their offspring. There also could be another process involved where one's conscious or subconscious mind might affect genetic mutations. We know that sexual selection affects the gene pool on a macro level since undesirable characteristics are weeded out due to a lack of being sexually selected and vice versa. This is a conscious process that affects the change in the gene pool.

So I think that there well may be factors other than random genetic mutations which come into play which guide evolution without having to postulate that there is an outside entity (God) who is guiding it. God may have built-in a process in the universe which guides evolution according to a multiplicity of factors.

Evolution

The debate over evolution is pretty silly. On the one hand you have scientists saying that life on earth proceeds according to the laws of evolution. On the other you have religiosos maintaining that either God created humans full blown or else, the newest wrinkle, creation by design. My opinion is somewhere between the two. I certainly think that God is sophisticated enough to incorporate the principle of evolution into the universe as a mechanism for generating more complex life forms from less complex life forms, but did God decree that from this mechanism human beings would evolve? No, I don't think so. The decree is extraneous. It's probably inherent in the universe that more intelligent organisms will eventually replace less intelligent ones. After all, does anyone really think that, if the dinosaurs were alive today, it would be any problem for mankind to wipe them out? I don't think so. I don't think dinosaurs had the capability of developing high-powered weaponry, airplanes or nuclear bombs.

But I do think that there is more to evolution than simply the mechanism of random mutation followed by natural selection dictated by survival of the fittest. It is not only the environment that selects who is the fittest to survive. It is the organisms themselves. For instance, sexual selection determines, to some extent, which organisms will pass their genes on to the next generation. Over many generations one would expect that stronger and better looking and more intelligent members of a species would more successfully pass their genes on than their counterparts.

Among humans, one would expect that, after thousands and thousands of years had passed, providing the human race hadn't extinguished itself, there would be more good looking people around and fewer ugly people so an evolution of a sort is taking place which has nothing to do with random mutation and survival of the fittest mutants.

Another thing I believe is that modern humans did not necessarily evolve in single line fashion from hominids. There may have been several sub-species of hominids, each of which had evolved a different human-like trait, and were capable of interbreeding with each other. Some of the off-spring then may have incorporated 2 or more traits of modern humans, not by evolution but by genetic combination. Those individuals then might have inter-bred more successfully than other members of their sub-species who were deemed less desirable until modern humans gradually took shape. Genes can be passed on selectively according to the criteria of the individuals who are selective about their mates. Evolution can then take place in this manner which constitutes a very conscious decision by those involved instead of a very passive selection by the environment. In fact some of the individuals may not be as favored by the environment but are able to compensate due to their superior brains. For example, man is able to survive in very hostile environments due to the fact that he is able to devise compensatory mechanisms such as WARM CLOTHES!!

Therefore, I do think that other mechanisms than mutation and natural selection are at work. In fact so did Darwin and Lamarck who thought that skills developed by parents could be passed on to their offspring. Scientists today, however, don't believe that.

On the other hand, I don't think it was fate or destiny that produced human beings. Given similar circumstances on other planets, beings similar to human beings probably would have evolved, but I don't believe there is any divine ordinance that says that they would necessarily have to. They might have both similar and dissimilar attributes compared to humans. I do think that intelligent life would have similar characteristics. All would be curious about life itself and about the universe they live in. All would have discovered the same mathematics since mathematical laws, I believe, are universal, ubiquitous and are true whether or not the universe exists. I mean 2 plus 2 equals 4 regardless of what physical matter exists or doesn't exist. Scientists also believe that physical laws, such as the conservation of mass and energy, are constant throughout the universe

Therefore, I disagree with the creation by design people that God decreed that humans would evolve from lower life forms or that there is something unique about the design of a human being. What is true, I believe, is that in the universe there was the "potential" for an organism like a human to evolve. There is also the potential for many other human-like organisms to evolve as well.