While you wait for the much delayed next episode of Technoccult TV, featuring Elijah Brubaker, you can read this Wizard interview with him:

I think a lot of the problems that Reich faced throughout his life are still very real threats to anyone with so-called “crazy” ideas and I hope examining those problems through the lens of the past will shed some light on the social ills of modern life.

My less grandiose and presumptuous answer is; Reich’s life combines some of my favorite topics and themes. Human sexuality, fringe science, Nazis, political oppression, there’s even some stuff about weather-control and aliens later on. A lot of that stuff is just plain fun to draw and riff on.

Full Story: Wizard

Soma is a group therapy where people come together for about 18 months to do physical exercises and engage in personal and political discussion. It combines ideas from Austrian Jewish psychologist Wilhelm Reich, capoeira Angola, and anarchism. And unlike traditional psychotherapy, Soma rejects the authority of the therapist: during a session, a therapist is present, but he or she participates equally with the other members of the group and does not draw conclusions or make analysis. There is an emphasis on pleasure and physical release. The documentary shows Soma groups deep in physical play, doing theater and movement exercises. Participants call the work difficult but “delicious.”

Now decades later, Soma has spread across the world and is still liberating modern-day revolutionaries — young people, artists and students — who are fighting against the bourgeois and seeking liberation.

Full Story: Wiretap Magazine

See also: Soma: An Anarchist Therapy documentary.

(Thanks Surrealestate!)

“It’s been wet lately, hasn’t it? Really wet. So wet, in fact, that two artists got bogged on the way to their opening at Kellerberrin last Saturday, arriving only after being dug out by a few of the locals. Still that’s what you get for cloud busting and playing around with orgone energy. For the past month in Kellerberrin, David Haines and Joyce Hinterding have been chasing atmospheric phenomena in the way someone else might fish for trout. Through hope, coaxing, and a fair degree of positive thinking, Haines and Hinterding have been siphoning sexual energy into the Wheatbelt. Yes, this is cultish, but don’t be alarmed, it’s all in the name of creating rain.

In the 1940s and 50s in the American State of Maine, Wilhelm Reich was investigating the existence in the atmosphere of what he called ‘orgone’ energy. Reich at one stage was part of Freud’s inner circle in Vienna and many of his psychoanalytical methods are still used today. But in the course of time and on a different continent Reich turned his attention to more esoteric issues and in the process, many would argue, instigated the greatest sexual revolution in human history. His inquiry into universal sexual energy and its application through something called the orgone accumulator also saw him hounded by the FBI. In the end Reich’s inventions were confiscated, his life’s writings burnt and he died in jail. Something tells me there was more to this man than meets the eye.

As with all good contemporary art, Haines and Hinterding at the International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia (IASKA) is thick with research and high on the sub-culture factor. These two are by no means the only artists in the world interested in Reich’s theories but their application of his ideas is timely and offers more than a tongue-in-cheek look at the esoteric history of art.”

(via The West Australian)

(Cosmic Orgone Engineering Site)

I’ve been studying Reiki under two local Reiki masters here, and it’s been good so far. I’ll write more about it once I’ve progressed farther. I’ve completed my Level I and some friends and I begin Level II in a couple weeks. I’ll be studying straight through the year until the Master class.

The teachers aren’t your traditional New Age fruits. They’re more like existential yogis, but the Reiki they practise is phenomenal. As an added bonus, they begin sessions with a Kirlian camera. Now, don’t read too much into these. But interesting to see the results as I progress through sessions with them and my own studies.

The image (click image for larger size) is mirrored, so the pinky finger is associated with your connection to one’s intuition, the ring finger with one’s emotional state, middle finger with one’s physical state, and index finger with one’s mental state.

The first row of finger tips is captured as they have you in your normal state, then they ask you to embody happiness, then frustration, and then to feel as if you’re the most comfortable state with yourself as possible. They capture these four sets onto one film and voilà!

The broken lines represent a lack of connection or awareness of that aspect of your being. Beyond language and labels, just being. And as the rings grow in brightness, I believe they come to represent one’s comfort with just being a part of existence — letting the whole of the life experience wash over oneself.

I went today, and as you can see from the bottom-right image, my way of living is beginning to more wholly encompass all facets of being. It was a good session and the past year’s been good.

Might be worth looking into for those unaware of Reiki. As Saul Williams says in his song "Raised to Be Lowered":

To find the balance between all you sense and all you see
To find the patience and the strength it takes to let it be
To stand amongst the crowd and have the strength to hold your own
To throw away the pen and pad and simply be the poem
To rise above hatred to love through seeming contradiction
To seldom take a side and learn to compliment the friction.

I just got done reading the first issue of Reich, Elijah Brubaker’s excellent comic book biography of Wilhelm Reich. I highly recommend it.

Reich # 1 preview.

You can buy it from Sparkplug Comic Books, or fine comic book shops like Portland’s Floating World Comics.

Everyone’s favorite heretical Scientologist Channel Null drops some knowledge about NLP demonology:

Having generated some buzz with the previous piece on employing NLP demonology to get wealthy, I figure it’s time to revisit the process a little. In the initial installment, we focused almost entirely on the disciplining of those untoward thought-forms that redirect our mental processing power away from a more united, substantial goals. Browbeating and asserting authority over the rogue memeplexes inside your skull most certainly will accomplish that; the act, however, of entering an environment just to torture a poor, misguided neurosis into submission won’t happen without leaving some scars. Not only is smacking these things around all the time just ugly, it forces the practitioner into a dominator top-space that, while interesting to explore, can generate a sort of obsession that might take weeks to work out and will undoubtedly cause some trouble; never mind the extent to which the male dominator role gets overplayed in our society.

Full Story: Dark Science and Infernal Art.

And speaking of Scientology, Fenris 23 muses on the vitalist aspect of dianetics.

Update: Fenris muses furthur.

Wilhelm Reich’s instructions for building orgone accumulators.

Full Story: orgone.org.

Orgone powered love grenades:

If you want to clear out the unpleasant entities from your immediate environment, expel parasitic/predatory ET?s from your auric field, neutralize the energetic effects of chemtrails, etc., just make one or more of these and put it on the ground or in your house, according to your intuitive promptings.

My partner, Carol, and I have found them very effective for minimizing the deadly orgone fields around nuke plants, even the ones built on natural vortices (sick puppies, they did that intentionally). They also heal and strengthen all natural vortices and man-made ones, like the Caribbean Blue Holes. Life doesn?t have to be difficult and years of training and discipline are no longer necessary if you want to do big magic, to which I can bear witness. In the new (present) paradigm, one?s character and intention count more than training and institutional acclaim.

Holy, Holy, Holy Handgrenades construction.

(via Wes).

The entire text of 70s era Reichian Growth Work is now online.

Link (via LVX23)

Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about orgone energy.

Link (via Mutato Nomine).

Here’s an application of political sex magick:

On Thursday, September 2nd, for several hours prior to and during George Bush?s re-nomination ceremony, the Brooklyn Orgastic Politics Collective (BOP-C) will be conducting Orgone operations with several of our Cloudbusters, attempting to suck the fascism from the Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden. From an undisclosed location on the Brooklyn waterfront, we will be redirecting the flow of Life Energy above the deadly concentrations of hatred and greed accumulating in midtown Manhattan. If indeed our theories prove correct, it may be possible to reduce the entire convention floor to a quivering Saturnalia. The moans of Love shall ring out across the Land!

Link (via Sacred Whore)