Toward Ecosophy

Over the last dozen weeks I've surveyed some of the high points in the development of etheric technology in the Western world from Mesmer to Hieronymus. That's not the whole story by any means, of course. Many other researchers also noticed that there seems to be some form of energy, or something similar to energy, that is generated or concentrated by living things, and can be used for purposes of healing on the one hand and expansion of consciousness on the other.  That was not a new discovery when Mesmer made it. What set him and the other figures in this sequence of posts apart from many others is that he, and they, set out to work with this energy using Western civilization's strong suit -- its mastery of machines. 

A case can be made, and of course it has been made at great length and with quite some force, that our civilization's focus on building machines rather than developing human capacities is the source of many or most of our problems. That's a valid view, and the old joke about the five-year-old with the hammer who thinks everything is a nail is relevant here. That said, machines are something we're good at, and while it's worth putting energy into encouraging people to develop their own etheric capacities, I don't think it's a mistake for us to tinker with etheric machines as well -- especially when those machines appear to have significant capacities for healing and personal transformation. 

One thing I find fascinating about all of this is that the development of etheric technology has followed the usual course of an emergent science, not that of a religious or mystical belief system. One of the distinctive features of a science is that once the initial paradigm is in place, its development is cumulative: it starts with initial hypotheses and experimental procedures that are relatively simple and tentative, and builds on those, discarding hypotheses that don't work while retaining those that do, and gradually buildng up a body of technique that allows similar results to be obtained reliably by different practitioners irrespective of personal qualities. Religions and systems of mysticism don't usually do this, but radionics has done so. 

Mesmer's basic theory, which he derived from earlier writers and researchers, has on the whole turned out to be broadly correct, but significant parts of it have been jettisoned and more have been refined. Meanwhile, the technology has developed in an equally cumulative fashion. Mesmer's baquets made use of the curious fact that etheric energy in some contexts behaves like electricity -- it can be made to flow through conductors, and it can be controlled and modulated by means of something closely parallel to capacitance and resistance. The same thing is true of radionics today.  From Mesmer all the way to the latest variation on the Hieronymus machine or the high-end radionics gear used by British practitioners, the same principles apply, but they are put to use with increasing precision and subtlely. 

And now?  Radionics is a flourishing field these days; go online and you can find scores of websites where people are working with the machines pioneered by Drown, Reich, and Hieronymus, and there's noticeable interest in some of the others. (I haven't yet seen anyone building a Mesmeric baquet, but with any luck it's just a matter of time.) The collapse of public confidence in the modern medical-industrial complex is accelerating, and so is the parallel dissolution of widespread acceptance in the dogmatic materialist paradigm of todays corporate scientific establishment. There are good reasons for both these shifts, of course.  A medical system that has by and large given up curing people, because it's more lucrative to keep them sick and "manage" their conditions, has no one but itself to blame if patients go elsewhere, just as the proponents of an ideology that can only be defended by demanding that people ignore an ever-growing share of their own experiences are going to be disappointed if they think they can expect blind faith in their pronouncements. 

As Yogi Berra famously said, prediction is tough, especially when it's about the future. My sense, though, is that etheric technologies may be approaching an inflection point of a kind well known in the history of science, a stage at which many tentative ventures with promising results come together in a new synthesis that sparks a burst of innovation. That could open up fascinating possibilities, by itself and in conjunction with the ongoing exploration of Western esoteric spirituality and occultism. Still, we'll see.