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Intimations of a Spiritual New Age: II. Wilhelm Reich As Transpersonal

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Intimations of a Spiritual New Age: II. Wilhelm Reich As Transpersonal Digital Commons @ CIIS International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive Summer 2019 Intimations of a Spiritual New Age: II. Wilhelm Reich as Transpersonal Psychologist Part 2: The Futural Promise of Reich’s Naturalistic Bio- Energetic Spirituality Harry T. Hunt Brock University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/advance-archive Part of the Philosophy Commons, Religion Commons, and the Transpersonal Psychology Commons Recommended Citation Hunt, H. T. (Advance publication). Intimations of a spiritual New Age: II. Wilhelm Reich as transpersonal psychologist. Part 2: The futural promise of Reich’s naturalistic bio-energetic spirituality. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 37(2), 23–48. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ CIIS. It has been accepted for inclusion in International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ CIIS. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Intimations of a Spiritual New Age: II. Wilhelm Reich as Transpersonal Psychologist Part 2: The Futural Promise of Reich’s Naturalistic Bio-Energetic Spirituality Harry T. Hunt Brock University St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada This is the second part of a consideration of the later Wilhelm Reich as anticipating a future planetary-wide “New Age” form of this-worldly spirituality in ways overlapping with figures from the same era of Western crisis from the 1930s through the 1950s, including Jung, Toynbee, Bergson, Heidegger, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil. Where the first part of this treatment of Reich as transpersonal psychologist traced his evolution from his bio-energetic psychotherapy to a Weberian this-worldly mysticism of a universal life energy, his cosmic orgone, with its attendant features of conflicted “spiritual emergency,” this second paper seeks to further develop some of its still largely unrealized implications. These include the relation of his later system to neo-shamanism; transpersonal psychologies of presence, Being-experience, and self actualization; essentializing reinterpretations of the historical Jesus; evolutionary continuities in contemporary consciousness studies; emergent system approaches in science; and the potential for a New Age planetary identity for humanity. Keywords: New Age, globalization, this-worldly mysticism, shamanism, sexual sublimation/energization, presence, schizoid/anorgonotic, spatial orientation, protozoa, neuronal depolarization, quantum approaches, structuralism, metaphor bi-directionality, emergent complex systems, UFO phenomenon previous discussion of the life and work of shared planetary consciousness and re-sacralization Wilhelm Reich (Hunt, 2018) placed him with might be expected to take the form of his “inner- A other key figures from the 1930s through the worldly” mysticism, as the sensate and this-worldly 1950s, including Jung, the later Heidegger, Toynbee, cultivation of numinous-ecstatic experience within Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil, in their our predominant valuing of everyday social life and largely overlapping intuitions of a futural “New Age” individual personhood (see also Hunt, 2003, 2017). spirituality. This can be understood as the needed Reich’s development of his earlier bio- compensation for the growing secularization of energetic psychotherapy into a “new religion of traditional religion in modernity and the need life” for the “children of the future” (Reich, 1953, for a spiritual renewal in sense of meaning p. 197; 1999, p. 360) is a major example of just and purpose in the context of an impersonal, such a naturalistically understood sensate or “this- globalizing capitalist economy—with its sensate, worldly” spirituality. Its multiple components materialist values prioritizing the individual over not only anticipate more recent developments in a more traditional communalism. In terms of the transpersonal psychology and the new movement of understanding of world religions developed by Max consciousness studies, but have continuing, largely Weber (1922/1963), a spiritual New Age that could underdeveloped, implications for any still more help to unite the diverse peoples of the world in a distant global re-sacralizing of human existence. WilhelmInternational Reich Journal as Transpersonal of Transpersonal Psychologist Studies (Part, 37 (2),2) 2018,International pp. 23–48 Journal of Transpersonal Studies 23 https://doi.org/10.24972/ijts.2018.37.2.23 did not yet exist (Eliade, 1964; Tedlock, 2005; An Original This-Worldly Mysticism Walsh, 2007). That identity, however, was far more eich’s naturalistic psychology of spirituality consistent with Reich’s (1976) own interest in an Rshows a striking resonance with more recent original matrilineal spirituality, and his spontaneous transpersonal understandings of native shamanism, development as exquisitely sensitive virtuoso of meditative enhancement and schizoid deletion of bodily healing, and later focus on psychosomatic embodied presence, and New Age re-interpretations roots of cancer, along with his utopian revolutionary of the historical Jesus. response to the collective misery and class struggle Reich and Neo-Shamanism of a postwar patriarchal Europe. There is even the There are significant neo-shamanic elements common preliminary calling to the shamanic path within the sensate mysticisms, variously exemplified by early parental death (Walsh, 2007; Krippner, in Toynbee’s (1957) use of Bergson’s vitalism, Jung’s 2012), and a later awakening initiation that fits the (1955/1963) alchemical imagination, Heidegger’s characteristic pattern of “creative crisis” or “spiritual (1935/2014) sacralizing of Rhine and Black Forest, emergency”—with features that could only be Thoreau’s (1854/1982) abstract animism of New seen as “psychotic” by his traditionally oriented England woods, and especially in Wilhelm Reich’s psychoanalytic colleagues. use of the form constants of wind, water, and He was in fact led to his more biological luminosity to mirror the inner experience of vital and physical researches by his own spontaneous presence. Indeed, Weber’s category of inner-worldly visionary and bio-energetic awareness, as in mysticism comes the closest in his typology of the the blue radiating energy he saw between both forms of world religion to an original shamanic lovers and stars in the night sky—also proving template common among hunter-gatherer peoples so disconcerting to a young Erik Erikson in 1933 (see also Hunt, 2003). (Evans, 1969). It was these visualizations and inner Shamanism combined vision and psyche- bodily energy streamings, augmented by their delic trance (Bourguignon, 1973), hands-on energy parallels with lightning and northern lights, spinning healing and collective community guidance blue waves in darkroom accumulators, orgasmic (Tedlock, 2005), with a metaphorically structured sensation, and the pulsating pattern underlying all matrix of the natural order—as the rooting for Levi- animal movement that led him to intuit orgone as Strauss (1966) of the complex mythological systems a universal life force—within and without. As the that provide mirrored self reference for the non verbal felt energy aspect of Rudolf Otto’s (1917/1958) levels of personhood brought forward in numinous numinous, it was then largely superimposed over his states (Hunt, 2003, 2016). A sensate mysticism of increasingly controversial attempts at its grounding the future, supported by the mirroring evocations in physical science. of water, land, and sky, would also be important Classical shamanism, and the neo-shamanism in any planetary spirituality that might step back of contemporary transpersonal psychology (Walsh, from ethnic fundamentalisms, while still conserving 2007), in their empathic animation of physical some degree of regional identity and at the same nature, is simultaneously universal and intensely time respond to the globalizing crisis of ecology and local. Reich spent hours and hours observing environment. The latter was something especially the woods, lakes, and ever changing weather of central for the later Reich, who now emerges, sadly rural Maine. That resulting sensitivity helps to unbeknownst to himself, as essentially a modern understand Reich’s work with the cloudbuster less shaman. in terms of “weather control” than as a dowser-like It is an irony of time and place that Reich exteriorization of his inner empathic resonance with came to define himself with the Eurocentric concept the larger patterns of atmospheric change. Observers of “genius” rather than as sui generis “shaman”—a of Reich’s procedures with the cloudbuster stress category not then available to him since the more that he would not proceed without first “feeling” recent literatures on these worldwide ur-spiritualities the air to see if such intervention would be “safe,” 24 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Hunt since its effects could be unpredictable and even which, as in the accounts of Whiteman (2000), untoward. His cloudbuster operations were often can be with a hallucinatory vividness. Tedlock followed several minutes later by changes in wind (2005) goes further in distinguishing the feminine direction and moisture, which is as consistent with and masculine traditions of shamanic training, an unconsciously anticipatory intuition as with with the former, whether for individual men or any causal control (Raknes, 1970; Reich, P., 1973). women, emphasizing
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