From the book Wilhelm Reich: Selected Writings, Noonday 1973
DOR Removal and Cloud-busting
The “DOR Clouds”[1]
Preliminary Communication, April-August 1952
It has become possible to apply the principle of the orgonomic potential to the dissolution and formation of clouds. This technical application of the orgonomic potential was forced upon this institution during the emergency which shook Orgonon from March 21, 1952, till the present date, September 1952. It was a matter of survival in this region to find a way to remove the “DOR-clouds,” as we came to call the nauseating concentrations of DOR over Orgonon.
Let me first explain what these DOR-clouds are, how they look, what they do, and what can be done about them. They were observed and comprehended for the first time during the early days of May 1952. The main characteristics of DOR-clouds, as they appear at various intervals over Orgonon, coming in mostly from the west, are the following:
“Stillness” and “bleakness”
A “stillness” and “bleakness” spreads over the landscape, rather well delineated against unaffected surrounding regions. The stillness is expressed in a cessation of life expressions in the atmosphere. The birds stop singing; the frogs stop croaking. There is no sound of life anywhere. The birds fly low or hide in the trees. Animals crawl over the ground with greatly reduced motility. The leaves of the trees and the needles of the evergreens look very “sad”; they droop, lose turgor and erectility. Every bit of sparkle or luster disappears from the lakes and the air. The trees look black, as though dying. The impression is actually that of blackness, or better, bleakness. It is not something that “came into the landscape.” It is, rather, the sparkle of life that goes out of the landscape.
Vanishing of luster and sparkle
The vanishing of luster and sparkle from the sunny landscape has been independently confirmed by several observers who have grown up on farms. Trees, rocks, telegraph poles, mountainsides, and houses appear “black,” although it is not really blackness. It is, rather, like the absence of light. To the orgonomic observer, it appears to be the result of a thinning or failing of the OR energy substratum that usually luminates into brilliant daylight, with sparkle and luster. It should be carefully noted that DOR-clouds appear while the sun is shining. The green color of trees and meadows disappears from the mountain ranges. Everything seems to go black or “dull.” One cannot help but feel this to be death, “bleak death,” as some call it. This bleak blackness hovers especially over landscapes without any vegetation, and over swampy regions. Swamps have a peculiar bearing on DOR effects. Swamps are basically accumulations of stagnant water. They enhance decay processes and are the opposite of fresh running brooks or rivers, which counteract decay. They are distinguished by the absence of orgonotic metabolism. Everything still remains to be carefully investigated in this realm. We are only breaking trail for a first overall orientation.
The lack of luster can be understood in terms of some reduction of orgonotic pulsation and metabolism in plants and animals. This seems to be confirmed by the fact that at the lake surfaces orgonotic pulsation also ceases; the water becomes calm and motionless.
A DOR-cloud is usually surrounded by normal atmospheric OR activity, such as blueness of the mountain ranges, sparkling of the sunny atmosphere, greenness of the trees. One cannot help but feel that natural cosmic OR energy retracts from the “evil,” “bleak,” “black,” “lifeless” DOR-cloud and lets it pass. Observations made at night show luminous OR surrounding and fighting the lusterless DOR-clouds. In daytime the mountains appear black instead of the normal blue-gray orgone energy color. The emotional impression here again is “sadness.” The color of the mountain ranges is now somehow “dirty,” or blackish with a purple tint. After the passing of the DOR-cloud, the intense blue-gray “haze” returns. We learned to realize exactly when normal OR activity again replaces the nauseating DOR blackness.
Bio-energetic distress in human beings
People react to DOR-clouds with great distress. Many do not know or cannot explain what happens to them. They call it “heat,” or “some atom dust,” or just “bad air.” Some are biologically insensitive to a degree which puzzles the orgonomist. There are others who know the deadly quality of these clouds, not intellectually, but rather with their First, Orgonotic Sense. “There is something wrong in the air,” one hears them say, or, “Something is going on somewhere,” a statement expressing awareness together with suspicion. “I cannot get any air,” or, “It hits me like a brick when I enter my shop in the morning,” etc. In some cases one must persist in asking the same question over and over until the answer creeps to the surface from a frightened or bewildered mind: “Yes, if you want to know, I feel it sometimes like something closing in on my face, like a wall, but I cannot really feel it, you know; and then I get that bad headache of mine” or, “My sinuses are going bad . . . ,” etc. etc.
If they are not completely dead emotionally, i.e., far below the normal bio-energetic level of functioning, people are usually aware of changes in the weather, in vegetation, and in the “general feel” of things. In the middle of April 1952, the buds were already coming out in the Rangeley region. People did not quite dare to admit such an astonishing fact, since buds are not expected before the end of May. In the beginning of June, comments were frequently heard about the peculiar “black” clouds that were coming from the west and for some peculiar reason remained “stuck” over Orgonon. Also, the lushness of the vegetation was noticed and generally appreciated.
Geiger counter reactions
The reactions of the Geiger counter to the DOR-clouds deserves special attention. At this point, only a few basic phenomena should be mentioned:
During the passage of DOR-clouds over a certain region, the GM counter will act in extraordinary ways. When these reactions were seen for the first time during the early spring of 1951, they were dismissed as “only” or “nothing but” failure of the batteries. Since then, we have learned to respect these “failures” and to read their meaning to a sufficient degree to form reliable opinions about the atmospheric OR conditions before, during, and after the passage of DOR-clouds. It is advisable to distinguish the “disorders” of the GM counter as follows:
a. Jamming: The portable GM counter (SU-5, Tracerlab) will race to the limit of 100,000 cpm or 20 mr/h.
b. Failing or fading: The counts will drop again rapidly until they sink beneath the normal background count of 30-40 The needle will remain at 5 or 10 cpm or it will point to zero with the range 100 cpm turned on. This will happen in a highly charged atmosphere.
c. Jamming as well as fading may occur each by itself in a highly charged OR atmosphere. Sometimes the fading is preceded by jamming. One also sees rather frequently the GM counter register a normal background reaction of 30 to 50 cpm, and then, after a minute or two, start racing toward the higher or even the highest possible counts, which would cause alarm in any atomic plant. The details of these functions are as yet unknown. But it would appear reasonable to assume that fading, jamming, and racing are all variants of one and the same basic disorder: overcharge of the GM counter tube. To repeat: the pointer will not move at all, i.e. failing; it may fail after an initial normal count, i.e. fading; it may rush to abnormally high values, either instantly or after a brief period of normal reaction, i.e. racing; or it may race to the highest possible count and beyond and then get stuck there, with or without subsequent fading, i.e. jamming.
These distinctions are naturally subject to corrections and to further detailed interpretation.
d. The “erratic” GM counter: During the passage of DOR- clouds, one can also observe a type of behavior on the portable GM as if, psychologically speaking, the GM counter has become “nervous” and cannot make up its mind whether to race, to fade, or to jam. In such cases, one sees the needle register the normal 30 to 40 cpm; then it races, say, to 500 cpm, drops thereafter slowly, in the fading manner, to 100 and further to 70, only to start racing again to 10,000 or even 30,000 cpm; eventually this is followed by still higher “erratic” oscillations back and forth between 10,000 and 100,000; it may end in jamming or complete fading.
These few distinctions in the disorderly behavior of the GM portable counter may suffice. It should be noticed, however, that GM counters which are enclosed in plastic material will most likely only fade or fail. This is so, to judge from only one observation with a new plastic-covered GM counter, because plastic material absorbs OR avidly but does not reflect it. This observation requires further elaboration and confirmation.
In the beginning, during March and April 1952, we were under the impression that the DOR-clouds coming from the west originated from atomic blasts in the Western United States. However, it was later ascertained that there were no atomic detonations in the U.S.A. in March 1952. Thus, the origin of the DOR-clouds remains a mystery to date. The onset of the disaster at Orgonon soon after the tornado struck in the West, March 21, 1952, focused our attention on the possibility that we were dealing with some very obscure cosmic events.
The DOR emergency at Orgonon worsened rapidly during April. Emotional and physical distress became unbearable, and it was now a matter of survival to remove the black DOR accumulations that hovered ever more frequently over Orgonon. Then an inconspicuous, long-neglected observation came to our rescue.
Far back in 1940, when the atmospheric OR energy had been seen here for the first time, through long metal pipes, at Mooselook- meguntic Lake in the Rangeley region, casual pointing of some pipes at the surface of the lake seemed to affect the movement of the waves. This seemed quite incredible at that early period of OR research; the matter was abandoned and soon forgotten. However, the incredible effect of metal pipes on energy motion such as waves apparently lingered on in my mind over these dozen years. When the suffering from DOR became unbearable at Orgonon late in April, a few metal pipes, nine to twelve feet long and one and a half inches in diameter, were directed toward the black DOR concentrations overhead, and connected through BX cables to a deep well.
The effect was instantaneous. The black DOR-clouds began to shrink. And when the pipes were pointed against the OR energy flow, i.e., toward the west, a breeze west to east would set in after a few minutes’ “draw,” as we came to call this operation; fresh, blue- gray OR energy moved in where the nauseating DOR-clouds had been a short while before. Soon, we learned that rain clouds, too, could be influenced, increased and diminished as well as moved, by operating these pipes in certain specific ways.
From the first hesitating attempts to end the emergency at Orgonon, more systematic experiments in the creation and destruction of clouds, as well as rainmaking and stopping of rain, began to develop successfully over several months, till the first two C.OR.E. “cloud-buster” units were finally constructed at Portland, Maine, in September-October 1952, for more elaborate C.OR.E. operations.
In the following pages, only the basic principles of “cloud- busting” will be presented. A detailed presentation of the technical aspects will follow in a broader context of Cosmic Orgone Engineering (C.OR.E.).
The Principles of “Cloud-busting”
“Cloud-busting”
The term “cloud-busting,” as used here, shall denote all engineering techniques which deal with the destruction as well as the formation of clouds of water vapor in the atmosphere and of orgone energy concentrations of all kinds, including gravity; briefly, with all phenomena which are related to or derive from atmospheric changes of climate, including weather, humidity, amount of rainfall per unit of time, storms, hurricanes, DOR-clouds, oranur functions in the atmosphere, atmospheric OR energy changes of all kinds, the origin of deserts as well as of areas of green vegetation, and all similar functions which depend on the presence or absence, on the scarcity or plentifulness, of OR energy, oxygen, water vapor, rain, sun, and wind, and their interaction.
Technological use of the “orgonomic potential”
The “orgonomic potential” denotes all functions in nature which depend on the flow of cosmic energy, or potential, from LOW TO HIGH or from WEAKER TO STRONGER SYSTEMS. Thus the orgonomic potential is the basis of and functions contrary to the mechanical potential, heat, electromagnetic energy, mechanical potential of position, etc. The orgonomic potential is most clearly expressed in the maintenance in most animals on this planet of a temperature higher than that of the environment, and in the function of gravitational attraction. In both cases, the stronger energy system draws energy from or attracts a weaker system; in both cases, the potential is directed from low to high, or from weak to strong. Gravitation obviously functions on this basis.
The technique of cloud-busting is to a very large extent, if not wholly, based on the technological use of the orgonomic potential as it governs the OR energy functions of the atmosphere.
The technological use of the orgonomic potential can be divided, basically, into two major groups:
A. Increase of the OR potential
In this case we concentrate OR energy and build up a steeper or stronger OR potential. This will have entirely different effects than
B. Decrease of the OR potential
In this case, we disperse or dissipate OR energy, lowering the potential difference and creating a tendency toward more or less equal distribution of the OR energy in the atmospheric OR energy envelope of the planet. We act in the direction of the mechanical potential.
Rain clouds, thunderclouds, hurricanes, and tornadoes are, from the viewpoint of orgonomy, different expressions of basically one and the same function, i.e., combinations of concentrated OR energy streams and water vapors. Many atmospheric conditions depend on the intensity, direction, location, and similar conditions related to the combination of water and OR energy (H2O 
OR). Most of these conditions still await detailed study and logical comprehension.
However, the two basic principles of cloud-busting, increase and decrease of the OR potential, suffice at the moment to make their technological use comprehensible.
If we wish to destroy clouds, we must use the orgonomic potential in such a manner that the potential decreases.
If we wish to create clouds or to increase the power of existing clouds, we must use the OR potential in such a manner that the potential between clouds and their immediate environment increases.
In order to execute these two basic principles in a satisfactory manner, we must, logically, construct and use a device which is capable of adding OR energy to the atmospheric OR energy envelope; or we must construct a device which will draw energy from the OR envelope in such a manner that the affected region loses certain amounts of energy to other regions, thus changing the atmospheric energy concentrations.
Since adding energy to the atmosphere is not yet possible, we must use the other principle, that of DRAWING ENERGY FROM THE ATMOSPHERE.
Drawing off atmospheric OR energy
In order to draw off atmospheric OR energy, we must accomplish two tasks: (a) we must use a device that draws OR energy; (b) we must know into what place to draw this energy. Our solution is to change the basic principle of the functioning of the lightning rod.
The lightning rod, too, functions according to OR energy principles, since ‘lightning” is a discharge of atmospheric OR energy in a very narrow space. The pointed rod, reaching into the atmosphere, attracts the lightning discharge and conducts it through heavy wires into the ground. This lightning-rod system functions according to orgonomic and not according to electrical principles. In the lightning-rod system, the atmospheric charge is drawn from the atmosphere toward the point of the rod and further toward the earth’s crust. It is, thus, the orgonomic potential from weak to strong which is operative in the case of the lightning rod. If the electrical potential from high to low were operative in the lightning- rod system, the direction of flow would necessarily be the reverse, from the earth’s crust toward the atmosphere; the energy would stream off and away from the point of the lightning rod.
Cloud-busting operates in agreement with the principle of the lightning rod, only if we put both functions, cloud-busting and lightning rod, on the common functional basis of the OR potential.
Cloud-busting deviates from the lightning-rod principle in four ways:
(1) Its purpose is not to draw and ground bolts of lightning but to draw OR energy charges out of atmosphere and clouds. In doing so, it deals with the same kind of force as in lightning, with one important difference: the cloud-buster draws the charges slowly and in small amounts, in contrast to the lightning rod. (2) It does so by way of long, hollow pipes, and not by way of solid steel rods.
The pipes, any number of them, and any length beyond a minimum of about four meters or ten feet, used in our first cloud- busting experiment have the function (3) of triggering the atmospheric OR energy flow into certain directions. The function of the pipes is fulfilled with this triggering of directional flow. Once the OR energy flow is directed at will, it continues in the same direction, until another natural or artificial stimulus changes it again. The lightning rod, on the other hand, is not intended to direct OR energy flow. It only functions as a conductor toward the ground in case concentrated OR energy discharge, i.e., lightning, happens to come its way.
(4) The OR charges are drawn not into the ground but into water, preferably into the flowing water of brooks, lakes, and rivers. We draw into water since the attraction between water and OR energy is greater than between other elements and OR energy. Water not only attracts OR rapidly but also holds it, especially in clouds. We thus have the following picture of the process of cloud-busting:
This sketch depicts only the principle of cloud destruction. It does not suffice to enable the technician to destroy all existent types of clouds. This remains a task of future experimentation in cosmic engineering, to be solved in many ways, in various regions of the globe, with various models of cloud-busters (varying in number, length, and width of pipes, direction of draw, size of clouds, maturity of our experience, etc.). The principle, however, may be described as basically complete:
One dissipates clouds of water vapor by withdrawing, according to the orgonomic potential, atmospheric (cosmic) OR energy from the center of a cloud. This weakens the cohesive power of the cloud. There will be less energy to carry the water vapors, and the cloud necessarily must dissipate. The orgonomic potential between cloud and environment is lowered.
The creation of clouds
The principle used in the creation of clouds is the same as in the destruction of clouds: the orgonomic potential from low to high. However, whereas in the destruction of clouds we draw off energy from the cloud proper, if we wish to enlarge existing clouds and proceed toward rainmaking, we draw energy from the close vicinity of the cloud. The drawing on page 446 depicts the process.
The technological experiment bears out the theoretical assumption. Clouds dissipate when the cloud-buster pipes are aimed at their center; they grow when we aim at the close vicinity in the cloud-free sky.
One may create clouds in the cloud-free sky in a certain manner, by disturbing the evenness in the distribution of the atmospheric OR energy. Thus, clouds appear when we draw energy from the air. The more clouds that are present and the heavier they are, the easier it is to induce growth of clouds and finally rain. The fewer clouds, the more difficult it is and the longer it takes until the clouds yield their water. Practically, a rather sharp distinction exists between rainmaking in a cloudy as against a cloud-free sky.
No matter what the variations, the principle remains the same: drawing from an existent cloud destroys the cloud; drawing from its vicinity makes it grow.
It is necessary to stop at this point. Strong reactions to cloud- busting in Rangeley, Maine, have been observed in distant regions (Boston). Such influence on far-away regions is due to the continuity of the OR envelope. The details will require extensive and careful study. We have always been cautious not to overdo while cloud-busting, since small twisters and rapid changes of winds have been observed, beyond any reasonable doubt. Also, on one occasion, heavy, prolonged rain occurred upon faulty operation.
Cloud-busting as a task of cosmic OR engineering will by far transcend the facilities and potentialities of any one institution and even state or country. Cloud-busting is truly an international matter with no regard for national borders. There are neither passport controls nor customs officers in the sky where the weather is being made. This is good and as it should be in cosmic OR engineering.
Lawful regulation of cloud-busting will prove indispensable if chaos is to be avoided.
The Emotional Desert
Introduction[2]
Attempts at a natural-scientific formulation of medical and psychiatric functions must be based on reliable criteria of judgment. Such a statement would have sounded banal only half a century ago. However, along with the beneficial effects of what may be termed democratization of science and medicine went the unpermissible abuse of scientific clarity in thinking and experiment. In the realm of psychiatry, two opposite directions developed from the old dichotomy between the “meaning” and the “energy functions” of disease. Most psychologists and psychotherapists do not seem to understand that an “opinion” or an “idea” about a symptom or a disease picture is in no way a scientific statement. “Scientific” here has nothing to do with self-centered scholasticism. It means integration of various criteria for the security of our judgments against error and against uncontrollable opining. Taking the development of character analysis from 1924 to 1955 as a good example of such judgment, let us summarize briefly a few of the indispensable criteria of sound judgment. This will be necessary since medicine will undergo radical change.
The first requirement is full orientation concerning the realm under investigation. A flier must know first of all whether he is piloting a Piper Cub or a jet plane. A chemist, if he claims the distinction of being “scientific,” must know that his realm is confined to the analysis of dead matter. He would inevitably go wrong and cause much damage if, in a position of authority, he were unwise enough to judge matters of psychiatry of the insane. In this volume, the red thread of our inquiry was not oriented according to the ideas in disease hut exclusively according to the energy functions. The first groping attempts to come to grips with the “character” of a person were methodically clear as to the moral approach. By putting aside ethical judgment of what is considered “good” or “bad,” we have substituted an entirely different measure of orientation: the energy functions active in the organism under all circumstances. Variations of these energy functions, the economy of energy charge and discharge, the “energy equilibrium,” and the pathological “energy household” were centered on the assumption that there existed a concrete biological energy, the life energy. This energy was, at first, hypothetically assumed to govern functions of both the soma and the mind in the common functioning principle of the bio-energetic core of the organism. With this functional innovation in our approach to disease, we escaped the pitfalls of mechanistic rigidities of thinking as well as mystical, merely psychological, baseless ideas about what is healthy and what is not. “Character” thus became a bio-energetic term. It comprised the somatic as well as the psychological realm. “Emotional,” too, was no longer something “psychic.” It is the motion of energy potentials in the organism. “Libido stasis,” always conceived as the physiological element in mental disease, came more and more to mean stagnant, immobilized bio-energy. The technique of character analysis aimed basically at mobilizing the stagnant energy contained in the armor in the “middle layer” of the character structure. The “principle of energy withdrawal” governed the total effect of cure. By withdrawing energy from the disease symptoms, at first only the psychic ones, it was possible to achieve dissolution of the compulsive ideas or the phobic structure. “Withdrawal of energy” meant loss of energy in one place, but it also meant increase of the energy level in other places or functions of the living organism. The better the result in the withdrawal of energy from rigidities, muscular armor, symptoms, the more alive and mobile the organism became, until the “contact anxiety” in the genital sphere, the “orgasm anxiety,” emerged as the last major obstacle to the establishment of the equilibrium in the organismic energy household.
The Principle of Energy Withdrawal with the Cloud-buster (1952)
The principle of “energy withdrawal” was first established around 1924, slowly replacing the method of eliminating symptoms by way of association. In 1952, twenty-eight years later, several of the old familiar functions of character analysis turned up, quite unexpectedly, but logically on firm ground during the great DOR emergency at Orgonon. Our survival at Orgonon depended upon “drawing off the DOR-clouds,” which gathered and hovered over Orgonon, into a well or a lake. We met again with the principle of energy withdrawal, this time not in the realm of bio-energetics but in the realm of non-living nature.
DOR energy soon was recognized as immobilized, or stagnant, atmospheric life energy. Early in 1952, several persons at Orgonon observed an excitation of the natural, bluish OR energy surrounding the blackish, nauseating, depressing DOR-clouds. It was obvious that unaffected OR energy became somehow highly excited by the presence of the DOR-clouds and seemed to surround them.
When pipes, connected with a well or the lake (see “DOR Removal and Cloud-Busting”), were pointed toward the DOR- cloud, it began slowly to shrink from the periphery toward the center, the normal blue extended further toward the formerly blackish realm, until the DOR-clouds vanished completely. Thereupon, the high excitation of blue OR energy seemed to abate and the symptoms of nausea and oppression vanished in the observer.
This observation was in agreement with the fact that in the oranur reaction it was the surrounding atmospheric energy, and not the nuclear material, which sent the Geiger counter soaring to 100,000 counts per minute and more.
In both cases, the natural, well-functioning life energy reacted with severe excitation to the presence of immobilized, stale, deadly life energy. However, immobilized energy is not inactive energy. When an organism dies and ceases to function as an integrated unit, it begins to decay, i.e., it loses its energy level. The energetic system disintegrates into smaller functional units, rot bacteria and ultimately to T-bacilli.
In disease, this activity of the immobilized energy unit going stale is the factor that irritates the otherwise normally functioning energetic system. The first response on the part of the total organism to this type of irritation is what we must, in a broader sense, call sequestration of the diseased part; “sequestration” here means the isolation or exclusion of the diseased part from the integrated whole.
OR versus DOR in Medical Pathology
Let us now summarize a few typical examples from well-known medical pathology which demonstrate the sequestration of disease on the part of the well-functioning whole.
Rise in temperature in infectious disease is the immediate expression of an excitation of the orgonotic energy system, its activation for sequestration on a higher level of functioning.
Local inflammation is basically the same kind of process, no matter what kind of irritating stimulus is involved: the intrusion of a splinter, an acute local infection, an injury of whatever mechanical kind, etc. We know that the reactive fever is a sign of the life force fighting the disease. Functional fever is, too, a reaction of the organismic life energy to a disturbance of its integrity.
There are two well-known borderlines which must not be overstepped lest the organism as a whole perish. One is an overexcitation beyond a certain measurable temperature level, varying with the species. The other is a very weak reaction, which permits the invader to spread its deleterious effects until the whole organism dies. In the first case, the organism perishes from its own excessive reaction. In the second case, it perishes from being overwhelmed by the noxious agents, whether in the form of sepsis, gangrene, cancer dissemination (“cancerosis”), or similar processes. The common denominator is the failure of sequestration, with subsequent disintegration of the unity of organs.
The function of cure thus seems to depend entirely upon a balance in the struggle between the noxious invader and the reacting sequestration. Too much sequestration—in other words, using all of the body’s energy reserves in combat with the invader—will deplete the organism of energy necessary for its own use. Too weak, too little, or incomplete sequestration will permit the invader to immobilize the organism bit by bit. We shall later realize how this functioning is applicable in combating the emotional plague.
In the process of inflammation, white blood cells multiply rapidly and pour into the diseased region, surrounding and permeating completely the sequestered part. In the process of immunity, a mild, still innocuous attack forewarns the organism of the true nature of the invader. The life energy has become “used” or “accustomed” to the danger. In case of a repeat attack, it would know much better how to sequester the invader.
In these cases and in many others of a similar nature, the living organism perpetuates the integrity of the organs by exclusion of the disturbed part which was not strong enough to resist or to sustain itself against the beginning of the dying process. Death is at first confined locally, but in every case is potentially capable of and directed toward destroying the total organism.
We may with good reason assume that wherever a disease afflicts an organ before it affects the total organism, the local OR energy has become immobilized, stagnant energy. The unity of the organism is disrupted. The edema which so typically accompanies inflammation of the liver, cancerous tumors of the stomach, or such minor disorders as gingivitis, or puffiness after too much alcohol, is a vivid expression and direct evidence of the immobilization of life energy in the diseased part. Edema is caused by a cessation of the circulation of fluid. This cessation is the direct result of immobilization of the moving force, the organismic orgone energy. Thus, the movement of the life energy in the organism appears as the common denominator of the mechanical movement of organ and fluids and of the integration of the organs into the functional totality of what we call “organism.”
We shall now take a step further into this interesting territory of functional medicine. We must ask how immobilized life energy, DOR, looks to us when we examine the diseased organism directly, not indirectly as a result of the mere influence of such functions as inflammation, immunization, or edema. These are secondary manifestations. There must be primary ones.
Let us first distinguish DOR, the mass-free energy form of stalemated life energy, from MELANOR, the material, substantive form of immobilized life energy.
In order to comprehend well-known phenomena microscopically and clinically in terms of primary life functions, we must remind ourselves of what we already know about melanor and DOR from atmospheric OR energy research.
The functional interrelation of atmosphere and organism is obvious. The living organism depends on the atmosphere for oxygen, water vapor, water, for the elimination of carbon dioxide, and primarily on the presence of life energy (the problem of life in the desert is a special one). Furthermore, it cannot be repeated often enough that the basic constituents of life as well as of atmosphere are the same: O, H, C, and N. There can therefore be little hesitation in linking up the living organism with the atmosphere and the outer crust of the earth much more closely than mere chemically oriented medicine has been capable of doing heretofore.
To the free-moving, pulsating, luminating life energy in both the organism and outer nature we must attribute the crucial role of maintaining life. Water and rain in the desert are useless unless there is OR energy capable of making the soil absorb and retain the fluid, just as water and oxygen are useless for an organism in which a subsiding OR energy potential makes it impossible to hold water and to continue the metabolism of O2—CO2. Thus, the functional view supersedes the mechanical view in medicine on mere observational grounds.
Sequestration of DOR in Living and Non-Living Nature
We shall not be surprised to learn that the same principle of sequestration of the invading disturber of the integrity of the organism holds true in non-living nature too, in the formation of “dust devils,” tornadoes, and similar disturbances of the atmosphere. DOR-clouds are encircled by highly excited OR energy. When drawing fresh OR energy from the west or southwest, whirling air currents arise, similar to the “dust devils” in deserts and in regions which are developing into desert. The atmospheric Geiger reaction may reach 100.000 and more counts per minute, as a sure sign of high excitation in the atmospheric energy. It is as if the atmosphere mere feverish. Strong winds usually in the form of sudden gusts develop, driving blackish, dirty-looking clouds ahead of them. These whirlwinds stir up dust; thus, the term “dust devil.” But this has really little to do with “dust.” It is the reaction of an excited atmospheric energy to the deadly, stale DOR that kills life. The whirlwind may develop into a true dust storm or into a tornado. The reasons for the different consequences in strength and form are still obscure. But the common principle is clear: sequestration and elimination of the stale intruder from an integral system. It makes no difference whether the intruder is coming from outside the system or has become a foreign body in it through decay or by separation from the totality of the system.
It would be dangerous now to draw the conclusion that any disturbing element in social affairs too should be “lawfully” sequestered and expelled. We are still suffering from the ugly misinterpretation of the Darwinian principle of the “struggle for survival” as a biological excuse for predatory social behavior. However, it is clear that what is meant here as “intruder” is only a life-negative, deadly element which threatens the safe existence of the total organism. The presence of the reproductive cells is not life-negative, although these cells are certainly intruders in adolescence, disturbing the peace and quiet of the home or the community if disregarded as a vitally important development.
It is a basic characteristic of life-positive functions, which constantly arise within a well-balanced organism, that they become integrated organically into the total organism. This is true for embryonic development in which the integrating orgone function of the organism maintains its unity. Any disturbance in this phase will create a malformation or monstrosity that will destroy the integrating powers of the organism and either will be sequestered or will destroy the whole biological environment, including the maternal organism. Cancer is another example of this loss of integration. In Raynaud’s disease, the distal part of a digit will slowly die off; it will blacken due to melanor, which is dead OR energy, and either it will be sequestered and fall off or it will destroy the rest of the hand and arm through a spreading gangrene.[3] Many questions remain unanswered. But the basic outline is clear. The mummification of dead matter, the appearance of black melanor on dying trees, mildew, melanor on rye and wheat, etc., are additional examples.
The functional problems emerging from these identities are grouped around the fact that melanor and orite are functions at the very roots of life. It is advisable not to delve further into these problems at this moment, to avoid speculation and to wait the results of careful observation and experimentation in the primordial realm of life, which includes bions, T-bacilli, mass-free OR energy functions, the processes in the soil and in desert development, and direct work with melanor, orite, orene, and atmospheric energy.
Let us now return to more secure territory.
Characterological Armor is Sequestered DOR Energy
Developments over decades, as demonstrated by the red thread that connects the first formulations about the character armor thirty years ago with the problems of desert development, are in themselves proof of the validity of the method employed in this development. There cannot be any consistent development of thought unless the method of research is sound.
The term “armor” already includes the physiological, energetic viewpoint. The armor is neither psychological nor static but a dynamic blocking. Life energy is blocked, i.e., prevented from moving in the armored domain. It is the total organism with the still- mobile energy that does the blocking. Let us now fill in this picture of the character structure by way of our newer and deeper insights.
We are slowly reaching firm ground in the depth of the organism—beyond the confines of mechanical as well as psychological functions—in the antagonism of life energy functions themselves, in the contradiction between a fully functioning and a stalemated or immobilized life energy. To illustrate again by way of our functional abstraction:
This abstraction, of course, is no more than a visual, simplified presentation of a most complex reality. It does not tell anything without this reality, which is constituted of innumerable mobile, ever-changing functions. From the infinite variety of functions at the very base of living existence we are able to crystallize, among others, one crucial, all-pervading principle: the priority of the Le (life energy) functions in the interrelations of organic chemistry, in water and oxygen metabolism, in respiration and energy metabolism, including the orgastic function.
These primal Le functions pervade every part of the organism, every cell, the organic fluids, the nervous system, as one total, highly excitable, and responsive function. Its immediate mechanical tool is the autonomic nervous system, which to some histologists and physiologists represents a “syncytium,” in other words, a network of nerves without terminals. Orgonomic observations of autonomic fibers in worms add evidence of the contractile, pulsatory nature of the autonomic nerves and perhaps of all nerves. The antecedent of the syncytial, autonomic nerve system is neuron-free protoplasm in the amoeba. The autonomic system is the organized form in the complex metazoal organism of the primitive, amoebal form of life. Thus, with life energy in its mass-free form and in its organized, mobile nerve structure, the lowest and the highest formations of life are integrated in living organisms. The swelling and erection of sexual organs in the process of excitation preserve and demonstrate the most primitive functions coordinated with the highest intellectual functions.
Among the basic functions of life we have found the protective function of sequestration. Sequestration of the unassimilable, foreign intruder occurs both in the realm of primary, fully functioning unarmored life and in secondary, crippled, armored, or otherwise handicapped life, from the desert plants to highly developed social conflicts.
It is characteristic of orgonomic research and functionalism in general that wherever basic functions are encountered, we are forced to deal with such generalizations and simplifications as that:
Both cloud and amoeba are identical with regard to the orgonomic potential.
Both the animal tissue and the social organism demonstrate the sequestration of foreign bodies.
Both the nerveless amoeba and the autonomic nervous system in highly developed animals are governed by slow expansion and contraction in the processes of pleasure and anxiety.
Both the secondary plant growth and animals in desert life and the armored human being show the “prickly” attitude in their reactions.
In the same vein, armored life exerts its power of sequestration of unarmored life, just as unarmored life sequesters intruding, unassimilable foreign bodies. To present a well-known example from the social realm:
The life-positive manifestations of natural genitality in adolescence are functions of love for love’s sake. To armored life, subdued and governed by the secondary laws of the emotional desert life, these natural primary manifestations of basic life are “intruders,” foreign, dangerous to existence. Armored life lives only, and can only live, on the basis of a strict negation of bodily natural love. Therefore, whenever and wherever armored life meets with natural love, especially with the most outstanding function in this realm, the natural genitality of children, adolescents, men, and women, it will exert the pressure of “social ostracism,” of negative, threatening public opinion, of slander, gossip, and defamation, or, worse, injunction. Armored life will thus try to sequester and eliminate the menace to its existence. This action is based on a primordial function of life, in defense of its organismic integrity and continued existence. The growth of cancer cells destroys the natural structure of normal cells; the growth of cholla and similar plants in the desert destroys the natural growth of trees and prairie grass; the growth of neurotic ideals and ideas destroys the natural, true, primary manifestations of life. Spreading of DOR clouds in the atmosphere reverses the life process downward again, toward absence of water, reduction of oxygen, dehydration and chemical reduction in general.
Briefly, OR and DOR are mutually exclusive, although both use the principle of sequestration for the preservation of their existence.
Since all social life over the past few thousand years has, for very good reasons, been of the secondary type, i.e., armored, happiness-negating life, it has eliminated, destroyed by the stake and by the sword, by slander and degradation all primal life threatening its existence. It somehow knew well that it would collapse and cease to exist if primal life again entered the biosocial scene. It knew, somehow, that the secondary vegetation in the desert dies out when the natural green prairie grass returns, when the soil regains its capacity to hold OR and thus to hold water.
How did armored life “know” the danger that threatened its continued existence? We do not have the answer. However, this question is similar to the old biological problem: how does the newborn offspring “know” with such certainty how to find the nipple of the mother? How does life “know” all the many and marvelous things it so beautifully performs?
I believe the problem is not so much how life does “know” as how it is possible that man has so successfully avoided knowing how life functions. As we proceed toward the common roots of variable and contradictory manifestations of nature, things appear simple, matter-of-fact. On the surface, one would not readily expect that the atmospheric life energy would act in a manner analogous to the manner in which the character structure acts. Yet it does.
At the very beginning of character-analytic research in the 1920’s, the structure of the human character presented itself as if it were composed of three distinct layers: the outer, socially adjusted layer; the middle layer, which contained all the armor blocks, “repressed impulses”; and the core, which functioned as the highly excitable, responsive, and mobile autonomous plasmatic life system, including the organized autonomic nerve system, which seemed to be governed only by primordial charge-discharge functions in balancing the energy system.
It is now not surprising to find the corresponding human reactions to the discovery of life energy also active on the social scene. To take the example of my own scientific and social career: the first ten years, up till about 1930, were not only characterized by most amicable relations with my colleagues in the profession of depth psychiatry; my early work on the problems of genitality and character structure soon brought me to the forefront of psychiatric pioneering. Much was expected, as the documents show, from my further research into the physiological background of the psychic structure. The world of psychiatry seemed enchanted and delighted. This attitude of admiration for my accomplishments in such publications as Der triebhafte Cliarakter (1925), Die Funktion des Orgasmus (1927), and my publications on the character resistance, beginning in 1928, was clearly replaced by fear mixed with awe in the early thirties as my work on the human character structure brought me ever closer to the full recognition of what today is an established fact everywhere: the sensations of current in the organism in every case where the dissolution of the armor, the “middle layer” of the personality, was successful. It was obvious at the very beginning of these experiences that the “streamings” of current were manifestations of physical, deeply rooted bio-energetic functions. This finding not only brought forth anxieties in the average psychiatrist; it infuriated him to an extent that made it incomprehensible how formerly friendly, enthusiastic men and women could change so suddenly and so furiously into the exact opposite.
The consequences of this deep fear and hatred toward my discovery of the later so-called orgonotic streamings harassed my existence and further development for nearly two decades, from 1934 to 1954. Rumors about my alleged psychosis and my having been interned were rampant. Defamation of every sort, from moral to medical, from social to professional, came my way. I trained myself to ignore the rumors, the silent malignancy, the anxieties, etc. I had the distinct impression, where acute dangers did not immediately blur my vision, that I had met with the average human character structure, with its armored middle layer, in my friends, colleagues, and even in some of my formerly most enthusiastic students. It was obvious that this hatred was designed to make my work impossible, to stop me by all means and worse. The greater the mystical admiration had been before, the more fanatic seemed the ensuing hatred, as if the haters had decided that I had frustrated or, worse, cheated them out of a promise of some paradisiacal fulfillment. The obstacle was, of course, in them and not in me. I had done my very best, to my knowledge, to guide the early friends along the rich but dangerous and treacherous path into the bio-energetic depth of human nature. The danger and the treachery always seemed to come from what had been known to me and the profession for a long time as “pre-orgastic anxiety,” in other words, the well-known fear of involuntary experiences, especially during the acme of the genital embrace. Orgonomy has never lost sight of this crucial disturbance in armored man. On the contrary, in the course of time this view has been sharpened in the careful study of man’s so-called “second” nature.
Only in 1955, when I witnessed in the Southwestern United States the secondary desert vegetation withering away under the continued removal of the stale DOR energy and the consequent reemergence of moisture in the atmosphere and prairie grass on formerly rocky, parched ground, did it dawn upon me why I had met with such deadly hatred, on the part of so many former friends, when I discovered the plasmatic currents in the core of the organism. Not only a paralyzing anxiety, the orgasm anxiety, had been mobilized, but the very existence, the very ability to continue one’s armored life had been challenged. Did they sense that with the return of the primal functions of life in the organism, with the natural self-regulation of primitive functions, with the disappearance of sadistic hatred, of the peculiar neurotic, perverted, confused, hidden entanglements, death would be near or would actually overcome them? We do not know exactly, but the kind and magnitude of the battle waged by neurotic organisms against an unsuspecting new science concerning the life process made it very likely that this was so. In the beginning, the admiration had been merely a reflection of a deep hope of delivery from the secondary nature, from the confusion and inner emotional desert functions. But when the middle layer actually began to melt away, when the force of the plasmatic currents threatened to take hold of the total organism, and thus to change all functions, emotional, social, ethical, the organism must have felt like perishing under the strain of such basic change.
The Emotional Desert
When a desert begins to develop, when the natural, original vegetation gradually falls prey to and perishes under the strain of drought, lack of dew in the morning, progressive parching of the land under a burning sun, and particularly under the constant pressure of DOR energy, the deadly blackish, dehydrating, and oxygen-reducing stale life energy, life still fights on. A new type of life, a secondary vegetation, adapting itself to the harsh conditions of existence in the desert, arises. It is an ugly, poorly equipped life. The stems of the chollas or cactus or palo verdes are not solid as the stem of an oak or a birch. The stem consists of single, narrow strands which are and remain brittle, and have no connection, show no fusion with each other. The whole plant is covered with bristles, reminding us, in analogy, of the prickly outer behavior of human beings who are empty and desert-like inside. This is not a mere analogy. The simile goes very far, indeed. The desert plants either grow leathery, prickly leaves as does the cactus plant, or as in the cholla, the chlorophyll-bearing structure is restricted to the outermost ends of the branches. It is characteristic of desert life that even animals have a bristly, prickly surface or sharply pointed organs to kill: the scorpion, the rattlesnake, the Gila monster.
Desert vegetation is adapted to the DOR atmosphere, to the minimal amounts of available water, to the parching, burning heat, a heat due to sun radiation which has to pass through the DOR layer that covers the land. This vegetation slowly replaces the last remnants of the primal vegetation, until, with the progress of desert development to the last stage, the Sahara sands desert, the secondary vegetation, too, dies out, and nothing remains but sand dunes.
With the spreading of the global desert, civilizations go under, life perishes completely in the affected realm, man either tries to escape or he too adjusts to the life in the desert on rare spots of green, called oases.
The continuous presence of death (DOR atmosphere) and the ever-present dull awareness of the inevitable end is characteristic of both life in the desert and life in armored man. The deadness of emotion, the dehydration of tissues alternating with puffy swelling, fatty flabbiness, or inclination to edema or disease which causes edema, alcoholism which serves to stimulate what is left from an original sense of life, crime and psychosis and the last convulsions of a thwarted, frustrated, badly maltreated life are only a few of the consequences of the emotional desert.
The bitter hatred and the readiness to kill primary life on the part of desert life is not merely an expression of frustration. It is in a deep sense, as previously shown, a struggle to survive and to prevail in the face of natural, healthy life: thus the bitter, well-organized fight against the forces of life, and the perfect organization in the execution or degradation of anything that has to do with unarmored life.
We still remember the compulsive feeding schedules of the Viennese pediatrician Pirquet, expressly designed to kill any selfregulatory move in the infant. This theory has created a whole generation of orally and otherwise frustrated neurotics, who in their turn ruined another generation of infants by way of their own distortions and emotional emptiness.
We remember the pathological prescriptions of neurotic physicians and gynecologists to the effect that babies must be separated from their mothers and be frustrated by having the nipple withheld.
We remember the devastation exerted on the whole population of this globe for ages in the prohibition of anything connected with genital functioning that did not agree with the conditions set for life by emotional desert souls. Who has counted or will ever count the number of victims of this butchery—those who have rotted away in the lunatic asylums, in the slums, in the penitentiaries, innocent victims of an organized, heavily guarded, malignant ignorance?
Making more and more laws will not accomplish anything. It will make matters worse. It is like trying to save a leaking ship in mid-ocean by bailing out the water with thousands of coffee cups instead of plugging the leak. The more laws that are made in the attempt to cope with ever more complicated and numerous transgressions of penal and moral codes, the more severe is the entanglement of the social machinery. The civil population knows less and less about the rules of government, since even the lawyers can no longer follow the details in laws made by anxious or ambitious lawmakers in confused assemblies. This may go on until a large, formerly clear-thinking, powerful nation finds itself enmeshed in paperwork as if bound by self-administered ropes, and ready to be toppled by any little quirk of a political scoundrel.
The remedy is to plug the holes in the social system; to remove old, obsolete laws so that no pathological lawyer or judge may have an easy excuse for his personal abuse of innocent victims of the tangle; to restrict making new laws to the necessary minimum to cope with basically new issues, such as adolescent genitality, the emergence of a new type of locomotive device, world air traffic, the existence of a cosmic energy, etc., etc.
The common root of paradoxical behavior, such as “Do not ever touch the plague,” appears to be the fear of perishing from one’s own deadly sequestered, carefully blocked DOR armor layer. Speaking up for the victim, standing upright in the face of defilement, smearing the dirty mess right back into the face of the pestilent smearer, requires being free of having to guard one’s own messy, sequestered middle layer.
We are translating old, well-known psychological and bioenergetic terms into more fundamental physical terms. The function of genitality was taken out of the psychological realm at the very beginning of character research, having been recognized as a bioenergetic function beneath and beyond psychology. We must be prepared to encounter the deeper, physical functions in other familiar psychiatric and medical realms as orgonomy proceeds toward the common roots of both biological and physical existence. We may approach the riddle of the “latent negative transference” and “negative therapeutic reaction” equipped with the understanding that armor energy is true, physical DOR energy.
Investigation of a more recent date revealed the fact not only that people in general are aware of their being blocked emotionally, but that, in the form of “hiding,” they are more or less dimly aware of what they are hiding: DOR energy. Armored people are aware of the potential expressions of the armor. Its blocked emotions are felt as “shameful,” “intolerable,” “unclean,” or “dirty.” This kind of selfawareness seems to be the very essence of the typical withdrawnness, bashfulness, embarrassment of people, especially of the reluctance to understand oneself. They have not only sequestered off the dead, stale bio-energy in their organism; they have not only put up “defenses” (psychologically speaking), “armor blocks” (bio-energetically speaking) against DOR energy and its expressions in their organisms; they are aware of the situation and hide as best they can even in the best psychiatric treatment. The “negative therapeutic reaction,” the getting worse upon successful treatment, can now be easily understood as a manifestation of a sharpening of the awareness of the organismic ugliness, of the ill smell, as it were, of what threatens to come forth with a final improvement of things. There is no other way to get to health but through the complete revelation and experience of the ill-smelling, blocked-off, sequestered realm of the self. And to do so, to have to face this humiliation, one gets worse instead of better on the approach to health. This is comparable to the “crisis” in diseases characterized by high temperature, such as sepsis, pneumonia, etc.
The getting worse when one should get better is no more paradoxical than the well-known function of the “latent negative transference,” which character analysis has shown is the most essential feature to be exposed in the beginning of psychiatric treatment. This well-hidden hatred of anyone who does point out the existence of a deadly, ill-smelling DOR energy; the “resistance” to revealing one’s true being, even in front of the very physician who is to provide the cure; the general attitude of “hiding” anything that has to do with genitality, the system of energy discharge, the general evasiveness of human second nature, the “Do not ever touch it”—“it” meaning the crucial, the essential, the point in question; the hatred of truth; the killing of truth-seekers, the worship of the masters of perfect evasion; the great hatred that persecutes unarmored life—all these are so many varied expressions of one and the same basic fact: the hiding, the sequestering of the dead, stale energy in one’s organism. From here several elucidations of man’s roots in nature emerge.
We should not be surprised to find identical functions or sequences of natural functions wherever we meet with the basic relationship of fully functioning life energy to stalemated, dead, and deadly DOR energy.
In the human character structure, the healthy life functions surround and isolate the DOR functions in the armor.
On the social scene, we experience the three layers of the human armored character structure in the relationship to orgonomy, first as intense enthusiasm, then as bitter, murderous hatred, and finally, after long and bitter struggles with oneself and the development toward better self-knowledge, as slow, carefully executed adaptation to the realities of the natural in man: to his love organs; his rational hatreds and their expression; his relation to truth and truthful living; his abandonment of hiding, conniving, circumventing indirectness, evasiveness of the crucial in life.
In atmospheric physics we encounter the oranur reactions, which show three distinct phases: when the normal, natural OR energy in the atmosphere is suddenly attacked by a nuclear explosion or similar noxious occurrence, it acts as if prostrated, helpless, submitting to the deadly blow, near death. Then, what is left of the OR energy after the paralyzing blow turns powerfully “mad,” hitting back, raving with a healthy, good, honest rage. The third phase is characterized by a calm superiority, a majestic conquest of DOR by OR energy, as if what is dead should be declared dead and be eliminated from the process of living, seething life.
There is much good reason to assume at this basic level of understanding that the hurricane, the tornado, the dust devil in the desert, and similar natural upheavals are functionally identical with attempts at self-cure in the catatonic seizure, the epileptic attack, the septic fever, the simplest inflammation of tissue in which OR energy surrounds, sequesters, and expels the DOR energy.
[1] From Orgone Energy Bulletin, Vol. 4, No. 4 (October 1952).
[2] From CORE, Vol. VII, Nos. 3-4 (December 1955). This article was originally Part One of “The Medical DOR-Buster (1942-1955).”
[3] Gangrenous tissue is black and green due to melanor and T-bacilli development.
