The featured text is an overview of esoteric sexual tradition by the scholar of esoteric religions, Julius Evola. It has a philosophical basis in the negative perspective put forth by Otto Weinginer in the 1903 text "Sex and Character", which itself is substantiated by Kevin Solway's "Mysogyny Unlimited" source collection: http://www.theabsolute.net/misogyny/, and the Jan 1, 2010 Futurist article "The Misandry Bubble": https://archive.org/details/TheMisandryBubbletheFuturistArticle Ludovici's "Woman: A Vindication": http://www.anthonymludovici.com/wv_pre.htm and "Man: An Indictment": http://www.anthonymludovici.com/mi_pre.htm is a positive transformation from the negative perspective. As to the outcome of the normal sexual process, Ludovici's "The Night-Hoers: Or The Case Against Birth-Control and an Alternative": http://www.anthonymludovici.com/nh_pre.htm, and his reply in The New English Weekly 26, 1944–45, p. 148:, ae of interest, as well as the resources collected by the creators of the book and documentary "Sweetening the Pill": http://sweeteningthepill.com/about.php "The Truth About Childbirth: Lay Light on Maternal Morbidity and Mortality", as reviewed in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is a source of insight: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=282220 Ludovici's "The Child: An Adult's Problem; First Aid to Parents": http://www.anthonymludovici.com/cap_pre.htm, and the resources compiled by the creators of the documentary "Father Figure": http://fatherfigurevideo.com/, are likewise useful resources. Beyond the traditional procreative role, the ancient Tantrists and Taoists, with ideas of sexual energy integral to their schema, formulated methods by which the sexual practice could be dramatically extended and enhanced, ultimately as a means of transcendence. An outline of such technique, integrating Taoist practice into a modern framework, is "Secrets of Sexual Ecstasy" by David and Linda Howe. Mantak Chia is a popularizer of such methods, though a collaborator of his, Michael Winn, later condemned one aspect of Chia's recommendations for males from the perspective of acupressure: http://forum.healingdao.com/practice/message/5409/, therefore, the work of David and Linda Howe is offered instead. However, for females, Chia's "Healing Love through the Tao" has provoked no objections, and therefore it is offered above. Evola's text is a synthesis of aforementioned philosophical and esoteric perspectives. Those sources would appear to offer important sexual advice in light of what follows.: For the neurochemical post-ejaculatory cycle leading to disruptions in the bonding process, see: http://www.reuniting.info/passion_cycle Pornography, while not being directly related to conventional sex, is a cause of a great deal of harm: http://yourbrainonporn.com/doing-what-you-evolved-to-do (unless the imprints of it on consciousness are psycho-physically transmuted in accordance with the user's deepest sexual fears) And there are items given in the above link that crossover to conventional sex, showing evidence of harm. However, such addiction is merely extreme neuroplasticisty, it is not pre-determined: http://www.reuniting.info/content/new-finding-calls-question-assumptions-about-sexuality Also, "A curious piece of research supports the idea that frequent orgasm can tarnish women's perceptions [if this is true, it is perhaps because they are superficial, and lack a prolonged, full-body, oceanic quality]. A group tracked their orgasms over thirty days, and then viewed pictures of men they didn't know. Who ranked the men the most unattractive and aggressive? Those who had climaxed most. Moreover, the women who had only climaxed via masturbation ranked the men the worst. Researchers noted that another study associated depression in women with masturbation. Weird, eh? (Incidentally, it may be that unsuccessful attempts to orgasm also create distress. Perhaps they raise frustration and dopamine to uncomfortable levels, creating inner turmoil.)": http://www.reuniting.info/sexual_energy_and_the_single_woman Indeed, from the following, we find that, "Even the sexy bonobos and their cousins the macaque monkeys frequently don't ejaculate when they engage in sexual activity. It seems primates need sex for the social bonds that soothe their brains—rather than mere ejaculation. In fact, comforting contact may be even more vital for pair-bonding brains like ours. In any case, too much sexual stimulation can actually leave people less contented.": http://www.reuniting.info/ejaculation_how_often_for_good_health In contrast, the following notes that, "Of course, most of us don't realize that subtle shifts in our neurochemistry are influencing us, so we tend to rationalize our feelings by pointing to perceived shortcomings in each other. The good news is that humans also have another program that can turn down the volume of our "move on" program. However, our bonding "pedal" only works when we deliver the right subconscious cues with the right frequency. The behaviors that signal Cupid to keep us bonded are activities such as skin-to-skin contact, gazing into each other's eyes, kissing with lips and tongues, wordless sounds of contentment and pleasure, stroking with intent to comfort, touching and sucking of nipples/breasts, spooning or hugging each other in silence, placing a calming hand on our lover's genitals, gentle intercourse, and so forth.": http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cupids-poisoned-arrow/200908/how-talk-cupid And, "Whether or not you experience ecstasy, bonding behaviors are a practical means of restoring and sustaining the harmonious sparkle in a relationship...even with a partner who is snapping like an alligator. Combine them with gentle lovemaking with lots of periods of relaxation (and a minimum of sexual satiety signals via orgasm), and you may find that you can sustain the harmony in your relationship with surprising ease.": http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cupids-poisoned-arrow/200908/how-talk-cupid The following research abstracts successively demonstrate physical and psychological problems manifesting from conventional intercourse (outside the procreative context, of course): http://www.reuniting.info/science/research From esoteric religious traditions around the world there are continual accounts extolling the benefits of prolonged sex without climactic orgasmic exhaustion, and how this can help in initiating physio-psycho-spiritual transformation. Here is a plethora of literature from esoteric traditions on the subject: http://www.reuniting.info/wisdom When a proposition by a mystic is ad hoc, it can be ignored, but when there is such robust cross-cultural inter-subjectivity, it deserves serious consideration. For subtle energies, some evidence exists of electro-magnetic correlates to the phenomenon: http://www.soeagra.com/iaast/iaastsept2012/2.pdf, for acupuncture meridians, there have been some such em correlation research yeilding positive results: https://mn.uio.no/fysikk/english/research/projects/bioimpedance/publications/papers/meridian_rev.pdf, http://www.siteground147.com/~centreba/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=107, randomized sham-controlled trials of acupuncture have shown efficacy, many of which can be read here: http://www.greenmedinfo.com/therapeutic-action/acupuncture, and Fienstein, promoter of the acupuncture based energy psychology modality EFT, has rebutted his critics: http://realisatietrainingen.nl/training/media/rejoinder.pdf - for chakras, there is cross cultural corroboration (see "The Subtle Body: An Encyclopedia of Your Energetic Anatomy" by Cyndi Dale), and there has been some preliminary experimentation to establish validity: http://www.universal-mind.org/Chakra_pages/ProofOfExistence.htm. For kundalini, there is cross-cultural corroboration: http://www.light-weaver.com/vortex/pdfs/Kundalini.Tantra.by.Satyananda.Saraswati.pdf, and Bruce Greyson has done some interesting research on neuro-physiological correlates: http://www.medicine.virginia.edu/clinical/departments/psychiatry/sections/cspp/dops/greyson-publications/OTH22.pdf The psychiatrist Rudolf von Urban gave serious consideration to these sexual energy concepts, but his argument was one from personal experience, related in the text "Sex Perfection and Marital Happiness": http://www.reuniting.info/download/pdf/SexPerfectionVonUrban.pdf Proving this with large scale experimentation is problematic because it requires aptitude of participants, and there may be privacy concerns, and also it is such an eclectic interest. But the following account relates the rigorous personal experimentation of the scientist Von Reichenbach to establish these effects, and other corroborating accounts, which when taken with everything that has been given, could be used to establish this as a fact: http://www.health-science-spirit.com/healsex.html There is a relationship with this and the "subtle energy" claims of Mesmerism, regarding which serious students can consult Adam Crabtree's "Animal Magnetism, Early Hypnotism, and Psychical Research, 1766 – 1925 An Annotated Bibliography": http://www.esalen.org/ctr-archive/animal_magnetism.html As for the first commission on Mesmerism which rejected such claims, its conclusions may have stemmed from an unreliable foundation. Gauld noted in his A History of Hypnotism, p. 30: "d'Eslon states that the commissioners of the Royal Society of Medicine saw at his clinic three patients, two of whom they had presented to him themselves, whose maladies improved during the period of observation. He quotes a certificate signed by two of the commissioners, concerning one of them, a girl of nine suffering from scrofula. Yet the commissioners deny they saw any improvement in any malady of known cause. D'Eslon also states that convulsions are nothing like so common among his patients as the commissioners make out, only 20 patients in more than 500 having suffered from them; as for the supposed dangers to which the convulsions give rise, he declares that only five of his patients have died during the last three years, and that all the world knows these were in a desperate state when they came to him. Furthermore, crises take many forms other than convulsions - some patients cough and spit, others sleep, and others are agitated and troubled - so how can the commissioners use "imitation" to explain the supposed prevalence of convulsions at his clinic? Nor can the convulsions be explained in terms of the irritation of abdominal nerve plexuses by strong pressure of the operator's hands; the touches employed are always soft and light, never powerful. Several of these claims are confirmed by Bonnefoy as an eyewitness of Mesmer's procedures. At Mesmer's clinic he has seen only eight conclusive crises among more than two hundred patients, and he has observed crises of which the aftermath has been unmistakably beneficial. The commissioners, he adds, make the treatment rooms sound like places of darkness and horror which one should tremble to approach. Mesmer's clinic, and that at Lyon, are not like this at all. Windows and curtains are always open, weather permitting, and no-one observes silence. Tranquility, cheerfulness, laughter, and varied and amusing conversation, make the time pass quickly. The truth, I suspect, is that convulsions at first occurred not infrequently at Mesmer's baquets, but that he later on somewhat discouraged them because they aroused so much unfavorable comment." A dissenter among the commissioners who evaluated Mesmerism was Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, and Crabtree summarizes his "Rapport de l’un des commissaires chargés par le Roi, de l’examen du magnétisme animal", published in 1784, and listed as item 72 of the bibliography, as follows, "Jussieu strongly disagreed with the conclusions of the principal report which followed the investigation of animal magnetism by the Société Royale de Médecine in 1784. He stated his own views in this treatise. The commission had seen the demonstrations of animal magnetism given by D’Eslon and Lafisse (Mesmer having refused to take part in the investigation). He distinguished four different kinds of facts observed by the commissioners concerning animal magnetism: the first were those general positive effects about which it was not possible to come to any conclusions as to cause; the second were those which were negative, showing only the non-action of the alleged magnetic fluid; the third were effects, either positive or negative, which could be attributed to the work of the imagination; and the fourth were those positive effects that could only be explained through the action of some unknown agent. Jussieu concluded that although the existence of a magnetic fluid had not been proven, there were enough effects of the fourth kind to justify the continued use of animal magnetism and further investigations of the exact nature of those effects." There was also a secret report made by Jean Sylvain Bailly, "Rapport secret sur le mesmérisme.", only published later in 1800, and listed as item 213 in a bibliography of Adam Crabtree on this issue. In it Bailly discusses the sexual effects of the treatment, and the concern of the society over it - Crabtree summarizes it as follows, "The report also points out that often the female subject experiences an ecstasy of sorts when in the magnetic crisis, a buildup of emotions which is followed by a languor and a kind of sleep of the senses. The emphasis of the commission is on not only the danger of overt sexual acts performed by the magnetizer, but also the fact that the process may well awaken sexual passions latent in the female patient which she will then seek to fulfill in fornication or adultery." These descriptions are of course totally limited in light of what would subsequently be found about the nature and phenomena of these trances. The journalist and historian Brian Inglis, in Natural and Supernatural, wrote of the stages of sonambulic trance proposed by Professor D. Veliansky, who summarized the observations of the mesmerists (pp. 139-140): "In the first, magnetic readiness, the patient was aware of what was going on. In the second, magnetic half-sleep, he retained some awareness, but not full control. In the third, magnetic sleep, he lost contact with external reality. In the fourth, somnambulism, he was entirely at the magnetiser's command. In the fifth, clairvoyance, he could 'see' into his own body and recommend a course of treatment. And in the sixth, he might achieve a state comparable to that which mystics had tried to describe: a feeling of community with nature, liberating him from the bonds of time and space, and giving him the ability to describe not merely what was happening behind his back, or when blindfolded, but also to 'see' what was going on at a distance." A half-century later, mesmerism was still raging unchecked throughout Europe, so the French Royal Society of Medicine felt compelled to launch a new investigation. This time the report was uniformly favorable not only to mesmerism but also to the somnambulistic psi phenomena reported by initial adherents. Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, the most famous stage magician of his day, also confessed that he was completely baffled about the clairvoyant feats of a mesmeric somnambulist named Alexis Didier. As regards this history, see, "The Opposition to Hypnotism and Psychical Research" from Alfred Russell Wallace's book "This Wonderful Century", ch. 17: http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S726CH17.htm As regards Houdin's experiences, Wallace provided a translation in his Extract from Js-E de Mirville's "Des Esprits et de Leurs Manifestations Fluidiques.", Introductory Note by Alfred R. Wallace.: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101075888329;view=1up;seq=397;skin=mobile In Authors of the Impossible, p. 237, Jeffrey Kripal overviews Bertrand Meheust's study of Didier, Un voyant prodigieux : Alexis Didier, 1826-1866 (Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond (February 27, 2003)), stating, "Any attempted summary of the history of psychical research and modern paranormal phenomena-including the one I have sketched here and there throughout the present set of chapters-is all too prone to impressions of secondhand rumor and suspicions of sloppy thinking, as if the authors of the last two centuries were somehow not as smart or careful as those of this one. The truth is that Meheust's study of Alexis Didier reaches to nearly five hundred pages and explores virtually every imaginable criticism and reading, and that in this it resembles and extends the work of such earlier researchers as Frederic Myers, William James, Richard Hodgson, and Hereward Carrington, all of whom we have met before. Such invocations, however brief, are worth making here, since there is much nonsense written about the history of psychical research, with the greatest nonsense of all being the ignorant claim that it was never carefully done." (attacks against the other authors he mentions are refuted in Gauld's "The Founders of Psychical Research" and Hamilton's "Immortal Longings") Texts on the controversies in this period include Colqhoun's "Isis Revelata": http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006292389, Gregory's "Letters to a Candid Inquirer on Animal Magnetism": https://archive.org/stream/letterstoacandi00greggoog#page/n6/mode/2up, Townshend's "Mesmerism proved true, and the Quarterly reviewer reviewed": https://archive.org/details/mesmerismprovedt00town, Lee's "Animal magnetism and magnetic lucid somnambulism: With observations and illustrative instances": https://archive.org/stream/animalmagnetism02leegoog#page/n4/mode/2up, and Wallace's review of the antagonist Carpenter's "Mesmerism, Spiritualism, &c., Historically and Scientifically Considered": http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S270.htm The extent of the healing effects of Mesmerism have been overlooked, readers are invited to consult Elliotson's "Cure of a true cancer of the female breast with mesmerism": https://archive.org/stream/39002011123164.med.yale.edu#page/n0/mode/2up And see, for modern corroboration, Bengston's "The Effect of the 'Laying On of Hands' on Transplanted Breast Cancer in Mice": http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_14_3_bengston.pdf And the extent of the effects of hypnotism itself have been overlooked - e.g. - consider the following near-miraculous cure by hypnosis of a skin disease that according to the article is "usually resistant to all forms of treatment": http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2021155/ But while all of this seems to be a digression, it is not. Gauld in "A History of Hypnotism", after discussing the rituals revolving around esoteric energy of the !Kung bushmen as follows (p. 617): "The purpose of the dance is to activate a healing energy, n/um, a distant cousin of the mesmeric fluid, which resides in the stomach and becomes heated during the dance. When it boils, the vapours rise to the brain, and the dancer passes into a trance state, !kia, in which he achieves power of clairvoyant diagnosis, spirit seeing, or travel out of the body. [...] The first hand accounts of those who have become healers in this way leave no doubt that the boiling of n/um and the transition to !kia occasion real and vivid sensations of heat, pain, dissociation, etc., as well as certain sorts of hallucinations." endorsed the position against the objectivity of these "subtle energies" associated with Mesmeric practices and folklore, stating that "N/um, the boiling energy of the !Kung bushmen, does not exist. It is imaginary, or at best metaphorical. It works, produces felt effects and genuine benefits, not because it is really there, but because those educated into Cushman culture believe that it is or might be.", though he later notes, "the immediate point, however, is that through the concept of hypnosis, like the concept of n/um, may be an artefact, corresponding to no reality that it has not itself engendered, the elements of the concept are not at all factitious, are not all derived from folk superstitions, socially inculcated practices, etc. Some are genuine in the sense that the phenomena in question occur independently of whether or not the persons to whom they occur antecedently know anything about them.", and Irreducible Mind, a text that he coauthored, contained a more favorable view regarding treatments relevant to the subject: http://www.criticandokardec.com.br/page_136_irreducible_mind.pdf Amongst the Mesmerists, the refined argument for subtle energies related to Mesmeric practices related to the alleged "Odic Force" of Karl Ludwig von Reichenbach - we can see this argument in the works of Gregory and Mayo (author of Letters on the Truths in Popular Superstitions) - Gregory even translated Reichenbach's Physikalish-physiologische Untersuchungen über die Dynamide des Magnetismus, der Electrizität, der Wärme, des Lichtes, der Krystallisation, des Chemismus in ihren Beziehungen zur Lebenskraft (item #583 in Crabtree's annotated bibliography), into English as Researches on magnetism, electricity, heat, light, crystallization, and chemical attraction, in their relations to the vital force: https://archive.org/details/researchesonmag00greggoog According to Crabtree in his bibliography, where he features that text as item #583, "it is difficult to distinguish Reichenbach’s odic force from Mesmer’s magnetic fluid. The similarity is reflected in general writings on human magnetism from 1850 on that often treat the two phenomena as identical." A defense of Reichenbach is provided by Wallace in a chapter of Miracles and Modern Spiritualism entitled Od-Force, Animal Magnetism, and Clairvoyance: https://archive.org/stream/miraclesmodernsp00walliala#page/54/mode/2up Wallace, in his rebuttal to the antagonist WB Carpenter, wrote, "Baron Reichenbach's researches are next discussed, and are coolly dismissed with the remark that "it at once became apparent to experienced physicians, that the whole phenomena were subjective, and that 'sensitives' like Von Reichenbach's can feel, see, or smell anything they were led to believe they would feel, see, or smell." His evidence for this is, that Mr. Braid could make his subjects do so, and that Dr. Carpenter had seen him do it. One of them, for instance,--an intellectual and able Manchester gentleman,--"could be brought to see flames issuing from the poles of a magnet of any form or colour that Mr. Braid chose to name." All this belongs to the mere rudiments of mesmerism and is known to every operator. Two things, however, are essential--the patient or sensitive must be, or have been, mesmerised, or electro-biologised as it is commonly called, and the suggestion must be actually made. Given these two conditions and no doubt twenty persons may be made to declare that they see green flames issuing from the operator's mouth; but no single case has been adduced of persons in ordinary health, not subject to any operation of mesmerism, &c., being all caused to see this or any other thing in agreement, by being merely brought into a dark room and asked to describe accurately what they saw. Yet this is what Von Reichenbach did, and much more. For, in order to confirm the evidence of the "sensitives" first experimented on, he invited a large number of his friends and other persons in Vienna to come to his dark room, and the result was that about sixty persons of various ages and conditions saw and described exactly the same phenomena. Among these were a number of literary, official, and scientific men and their families, persons of a status fully equal to that of Dr. Carpenter and the Fellows of the Royal Society--such as Dr. Neid, a physician; Professor Endlicher, director of the Imperial Botanic Garden; Chevalier Hubert von Rainer, barrister; Mr. Karl Schuh, physicist; Dr. Ragsky, Professor of Chemistry; Mr. Franz Kollar and Dr. Diesing, Curators in the Imperial Natural History Museum, and many others. There was also an artist, Mr. Gustav Anschütz, who could see the flames, and drew them in their various forms and combinations. Does Dr. Carpenter really ask his readers to believe that his explanation applies to these gentlemen? That they all quietly submitted to be told what they were to see, submissively said they saw it, and allowed the fact to be published at the time, without a word of protest on their part from that day to this? But a little examination of the reports of their evidence shows that they did not follow each other like a flock of sheep, but that each had an individuality of perceptive power, some seeing one kind of flame better than another; while the variety of combinations of magnets submitted to them, rendered anything like suggestion as to what they were to see quite impossible, unless it were a deliberate and wilful imposture on the part of Baron von Reichenbach. But again, Dr. Carpenter objects to the want of tests, and especially his pet test of using an electro-magnet, and not letting the patients know whether the electric circuit which "makes" and "unmakes" the magnet was complete or broken. How far this test, had it been applied, would have satisfied the objector, may be imagined from his entirely ignoring all the tests, many of them at least as good, which were actually applied. The following are a few of these:--Test 1. Von Reichenbach arranged with a friend to stand in another room with a stone wall between him and the patient's bed, holding a powerful magnet, the armature of which was to be closed or opened at a given signal. The patient detected, on every occasion, whether the magnet was opened or closed. Test 2. M. Baumgartner, a professor of physics, after seeing the effects of magnets on patients, took from his pocket what he said was one of his most powerful magnets, to try its effects. The patient, to Von Reichenbach's astonishment, declared she found this magnet on the contrary very weak, and its action on her hardly more perceptible than a piece of iron. M. Baumgartner then explained that this magnet, though originally very powerful, had been as completely as possible deprived of its magnetism, and that he had brought it as a test. Here was suggestion and expectation in full force, yet it did not in the least affect the patient. (For these two tests see "Ashburner's Translation of Reichenbach," pp. 39, 40.) Test 3. A large crystal (placed in a new position before each patient was brought into the dark room) was always at once detected by means of its light, yellower and redder than that from magnets (loc. cit., p. 86). Test 4. A patient confined in a darkened passage held a wire which communicated with a room in which experiments were made on plates connected with this wire. As these plates were exposed to sunlight or shade, the patient described corresponding changes in the luminous appearances of the end of the wire (loc. cit. p. 147). Test 5. The light from magnets, &c., was thrown on a screen by a lens, so that the image could be instantly and noiselessly changed in size and position at pleasure. Twelve patients, eight of them healthy and new to the enquiry, saw the image, and described its alterations of size and position as the lens or screen was shifted in the dark (loc. cit., p. 585). Dr. Carpenter's only reply to all this is, that "Baron Reichenbach's researches upon 'Odyle' were discredited a quarter of a century ago, alike by the united voice of scientific opinion in his own country, and by that of the medical profession here." Even if this were the fact, it would have nothing to do with the matter, which is one of experiment and evidence, not of the belief or disbelief of certain prejudiced persons, since to discredit is not to disprove. The painless operations in mesmeric sleep were "discredited" by the highest medical authorities in this country, and yet they were true. But Dr. Elliotson, Dr. Ashburner, and others, accepted Reichenbach's discoveries; and some of the Vienna physicians even, after seeing the experiments with persons "whose honour, truthfulness, and impartiality they could vouch for," also accepted them as proved. The facts of the luminosity of magnets was also independently established by Dr. Charpignon, who, in his "Physiologie, Médicine, et Metaphysique du Magnetisme," published in 1845--the very same year in which the account of Von Reichenbach's observations first appeared--says: "Having placed before the sonnambulists four small bars of iron, one of which was magnetised by the loadstone, they could always distinguish this one from the others, from its two ends being enveloped in a brilliant vapour. The light was more brilliant at one end (the north pole) than at the other. I could never deceive them; they always recognised the nature of the poles, although when in their normal state they were in complete ignorance of the subject." Surely here is a wonderful confirmation. One observer in France and another in Germany make the same observation about the same time, and quite independently; and even the detail of the north pole being the more brilliant agrees with the statement of Reichenbach's sensitives (Ashburner's Trans., p. 20). Our readers can now judge how far the historic and scientific method has been followed in Dr. Carpenter's treatment of the researches of Von Reichenbach, not one of the essential facts here stated (and there are hundreds like them) being so much as alluded to, while "suggestion," "expectation," and "imposture," are offered as fully explaining everything. We cannot devote much time to the less important branches of the subject, but it is necessary to show that in every case Dr. Carpenter misstates facts and sets negative above positive evidence. Thus, as to the magnenometer1 and odometer of Mr. Rutter and Dr. Mayo, all the effects are imputed to expectation and unconscious muscular action, and we have this positive statement: "It was found that the constancy of the vibrations depended entirely upon the operator's watching their direction, and, further, that when such a change was made without the operator's knowledge in the conditions of the experiment, as ought, theoretically, to alter the direction of the oscillations, no such alteration took place." Yet Mr. Rutter clearly states-- 1. That the instrument can be affected through the hand of a third person with exactly the same result (Rutter's "Human Electricity," App., p. 54). 2. That the instrument is affected by a crystal on a detached stand brought close to the instrument, but without contact (loc. cit., p. 151). 3. That many persons, however "expectant" and anxious to succeed, have no power to move the instrument. 4. That substances unknown to the operator, and even when held by a third party caused correct indications, and that an attempt to deceive by using a substance under a wrong name was detected by the movements of the instrument (loc. cit., Appendix, p. lvi.). Here then Mr. Rutter's [[p. 398]] positive testimony is altogether ignored, while the negative results of another person are set forth as conclusive. Next we have the evidence for the divining-rod similarly treated. Dr. Mayo is quoted as supporting the view that the rod moved in accordance with the "expectations" of the operator, but on the preceding page of Dr. Mayo's work, other cases are given in which there was no expectation; and the fact that Dr. Mayo was well aware of the source of error, and was a physiologist and physician of high rank, entitles his opinion as to the reality of the action in other cases to great weight. Again, we have the testimony of Dr. Hutton, who saw the Hon. Lady Milbanke use the divining-rod on Woolwich Common, and who declares that it turned where he knew there was water, and that in other places where he knew there was none it did not turn: that the lady's hands were closely watched, and that no mention of the fingers or hands could be detected, yet the rod turned so strongly and persistently that it became broken. No other person present could voluntarily or involuntarily cause the rod to turn in a similar way (Hutton's "Mathematical Recreations," Ed. 1840, p. 711). The evidence on this subject is most voluminous, but we have adduced sufficient to show that Dr. Carpenter's supposed demonstration does not account for all the facts.": http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S270.htm In the following paper, "The Sorcerer of Cobenzl and His Legacy: The Life of Baron Karl Ludwig von Reichenbach, His Work and Its Aftermath", Nahm reviews all attempted replications of Reichenbach's results, with which there were some heterogeneity in observed effects, and brings awareness to a particularly interesting result of Floris Jensen: https://ia701200.us.archive.org/13/items/NotesonSpiritualismandPsychicalResearch/eichenbach.pdf According to the Gale Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, "Some years after Reichenbach's death, there was a belated revival of interest in his work by the Society for Psychical Research in Britain, which formed a Reichenbach Committee that included William F. Barrett, Edmund Gurney, and F. W. H. Myers. In this case, it was precisely the possible connection with psychic phenomena that inspired this renewal of interest in a subject pointedly ignored by orthodox science. The committee made careful investigations, but was less fortunate than Reichenbach in obtaining suitable sensitives. Only three out of the forty-five individuals tested possessed the sensitivity postulated by Reichenbach, but these three provided interesting confirmation of Reichenbach's observations. In 1908, Walter J. Kilner, who was familiar with the work of Reichenbach, developed a technique for making the human aura visible. In this century, Wilhelm Reich 's theories of "or-gone energy" seem to be about the same energy Reichenbach explored under the label "od."": http://www.answers.com/topic/baron-karl-von-reichenbach#ixzz3NPEsi6zc Reich apparently had communist affiliations, and of course this is abhorrent. From a scientific perspective however, as related to the orgone energy suggested in the work of others, there is reason for interest, since as argued in a recent paper "In Defense of Wilhelm Reich: An Open Response to Nature and the Scientific/Medical Community", coauthored by 24 scientists and physicians and 3 PhD candidates, the attack on his orgone work is illegitimate, and replication of all his major experiments has been achieved: http://www.waterjournal.org/uploads/vol4/demeo/WATER-Vol4-DeMeo.pdf Reich's life tragedy, covered in that article, is an unfortunate example of the political consequences of pathological pseudoskepticism. An attempted synthesis of the bioenergetic work of Reich and the mystical-psychological ideas (http://www.cphjournal.com/archive_journals/Mark_Cescato.pdf) of G.I. Gurdjieff is provided in the text Reich and Gurdjieff: Sexuality and the Evolution of Consciousness: http://books.google.com/books?id=TKLnZDcw6wEC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false Reich had different ideas than the others investigated here, and that text attempts to corroborate them. The following item refutes Reich as a whole (and an item it links to refutes Freud in the article "Freud, Fraud and Sexual Health"*), but integrates specific aspects of his Orgone ideas with the ideas initially explored here: http://www.reuniting.info/science/wilhelm_reich_sexual_suppression_orgasm_unblocking_sexual_energy *http://www.reuniting.info/science/freud_fraud_sex