Movin' on up
Photo: Johnny Jet

Ever cracked an egg open on day eighteen to see what the embryo looks like?

It’s a standard experiment in most college level biology courses. Under the microscope one can see the various organs developing – the palpating heart, the bean shaped stomach, and the labyrinth of blood vessels that connect them all.

Back when I was an undergrad, my lab partner and I conducted the procedure. We watched in awe as the heart gradually came to a full stop, signaling the end of life, a grand finale we all have to face one day.

I quickly took my right hand and placed it over the chick embryo, face down, and asked my partner to peek once more through the microscope and report what he saw. He said the heart had resumed its beating.

I am well aware of the fact that the human race has known about the existence of a universal energy related to life for many ages. However, the basic task of natural science consisted of making this energy usable. This is the sole difference between my work and all preceding knowledge.

Wilhelm Reich, Archives of the Orgone Institute

I removed my hand and he noted that it stopped beating. I repeated this process several times, just so he wouldn’t think it was a fluke occurrence. Then I asked him to try. There was no heart beat, but as soon as my hand slid back over the embryo, voila, the heart began to flutter once more.

“How did you do that?” my lab partner asked eagerly. “Energy,” I replied. “Life force. The most prevalent force in the universe, and yet the least understood. We can learn to stream it out through our hands.”

Wilhelm Reich

With puppy dog excitement, he called over to the TA and the entire class gathered around as I performed this “miracle” a half dozen more times. The TA tried to come up with reasonable explanations for this inexplicable phenomenon.

One by one, I experimentally debunked each of his plausible rationales, to his great consternation. He was now on the hot seat, growing increasingly squirmy as his mind scrambled for possibilities. Luckily, he was saved by the ringing of the bell.

Not wanting to jeopardize my grade, I made no mention of the experiment ever again. In 1988, this form of energy work, Reiki, was not a household word. Up until that point, most pioneers attempting to integrate science and energy medicine had met with death – two murdered by their medical colleagues while the third died in jail of a heart attack, imprisoned for fraud, their books banned and burned by the United States government.

The Remergence of Reich

It wasn’t until the late sixties that the writings of Wilhelm Reich once again resurfaced in print in the US, triggering the greatest flowering of energetic based healing modalities the world has ever witnessed. Almost all modern Bio-Energetic Healing and Reiki systems can be traced back to Reich and his pioneering experiments.

Feel the energy
Photo: Nieve44/La Luz

Reich was an MD in the 1930s, and a controversial one at that. Being the first doctor to aggressively advocate sex education for teenagers, encourage the use of condoms, and crusade for women’s rights resulted in his being thrown out of both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

While in Norway, his experiments led him to the detection of a life energy which he noticed was closely linked to human sexual activity. He made the mistake of naming this energy “orgone“.

Sounding too close to the word orgasm, in conjunction with rumors of his patients going into ecstatic states, led to his expulsion from Norway as well. His next landing spot was the United States.

Practicing medicine in New York during the McCarthy era, he then constructed a device called the Orgone Accumulator (later lampooned in Woody Allen’s satirical film Sleeper as the Orgasmatron). Designed to collect and concentrate Orgone for the purposes of healing, many of his patients reported health improvements while they sat in this corrugated device, and all of a sudden the Accumulators of the 1940s became as popular as Beanie Babies of the 1990s.

However, all this attention raised the ire of the American Medical Association. Without conducting any experiments to disprove Reich’s claims, the AMA leveraged their political muscle on the FDA to take Reich to court.

He landed in prison, in what had to be the most intense medical witch hunt of the twentieth century. He died in prison not long after.

In the half century since his death, we’ve come a long way. Programs in Integrative Medicine are being offered at many of the nations’ most prestigious medical schools. It has become fashionable for MDs to pursue specializations in acupuncture and get Reiki certified. The twenty-first century may very well become the century of the “Energy Physician.”

Who knows? Maybe you’ll soon be able to surf on Amazon and order yourself an Orgone Accumulator.

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