In the very heart of Vienna in 1897, where Freud's shadows
were already gliding through the offices of psychoanalysis,
a man was born whose mind knew no bounds. Wilhelm Reich.
Psychologist, biologist, physician of soul and body, he
looked at the world through the prism of a pulsing,
invisible force that he called orgone. It was life energy,
the very same that surges in orgasm and makes leaves turn
green. He saw it everywhere: in a passionate glance, in a
storm front, in the very fabric of the cosmos. His path was
that of a free researcher, unwilling to acknowledge
barriers. He took a new step, offering the world the concept
of the characterological structure of personality, but his
thoughts were already carried further, into realms where
psychology merged with physics. He spoke of the cancer virus
as a product of imbalance in the flow of this very energy,
and his hands assembled strange devices from metal and
organic matter - orgone accumulators, inside which,
supposedly, things grew warm from concentrated life. He was
persecuted. He was called a charlatan, though his influence
was acknowledged in whispers. His books were burned, his
laboratory smashed. But he believed in the ether - not the
static Newtonian one, but a dynamic, living ocean in which
the Universe swims. And he was certain that Einstein had
refuted only a shadow of this idea, not its essence. From
this belief was born the most fantastic thing: the
cloudbuster, a device capable, according to him, of
dispersing clouds by directing orgone streams. And a cosmic
gun based on the same principles, which explained even the
nature of UFOs to him. And there was a wooden box. In the
late forties, he gave it to the government of the United
States, and the storm front over Long Island supposedly
dissipated. This story became the seed from which grew the
classified "Phoenix" project - a weather control program.
Reich participated in creating a hybrid radiosonde,
combining ordinary instruments with his technology. It was
intended to destroy "dead orgone" in storms, to tame the
elements. But the true purpose of the devices was concealed,
disinformation was spread. Dark rumors circulated that
orgone energy could be programmed, that with its help one
could influence human consciousness itself. His theories on
geometry and energy echoed the works of other visionaries,
also unheard of. Karl von Reichenbach, who described an
ether visible only to sensitives. Rudolf Steiner, who spoke
of the formative forces of the Cosmos. Georg Weismann, who
vainly argued that the shape of a capacitor or coil could
yield a response exceeding the energy expended. Trevor James
Constable, who created devices the size of a mug capable of
changing weather for miles around. The world of
"over-unity," where efficiency is greater than one, was a
world of resonance, where an organ pipe or a copper tube
wrapped in cotton cord became a laser for the ether, sucking
in and emitting invisible streams. One could feel their
pressure on the palm - prickly, granular, alive. Paper
amplified the sensation, metal conducted this force.
Everything depended on geometry, on shape, on the belief
that the vacuum is not empty. But the official world did not
forgive him this belief. He was convicted not for his
theory, but for disrespect toward a barbaric court, for
refusing to appear. He died in 1957 in an American prison,
imprisoned for distributing his healing devices. The
authorities acknowledged his achievements, but not himself.
His equipment was destroyed, but his ideas were not. They
retreated into shadow, into legend, into government archives
and into the persistent experiments of enthusiasts in
garages who believed that energy is everywhere, that it can
be trapped by the right shape, that the cosmos breathes, and
the human body is merely one of its resonators. Wilhelm
Reich, the persecuted prophet of orgone, remained a
controversial figure, splitting the scientific world.
Between genius and madness, between psychoanalysis and
physics, between a burned book and a secret project to
control the world. His story is a tale of energy that was
sought to be banished, but which, as he believed, is
indestructible. It simply flows from one form to another,
from an accumulator into clouds, from theory into myth, from
the past into our unchanging desire to tame the invisible.

Source: gopher://shibboleths.org/0/phlog/299.txt

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