Academics From Austria

"Some blood transfusion from the East to the West is a must to save Western science from spiritual anaemia."

"It is these chromosomes … that contain in some kind of code-script the entire pattern of the individual's future development and of its functioning in the mature state. Every complete set of chromosomes contains the full code..."

"You may suddenly come to see, in a flash, the profound rightness of the basic conviction in Vedanta: it is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling, and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling, and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense—that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it, as in Spinoza’s pantheism. For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? What, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but, inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you—and all other conscious beings as such—are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is, in a certain sense, the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as “I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world.”"

"For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light on the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else?"

"In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records, to my knowledge, date back some 2500 years or more... the recognition ATMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts. Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God). To Western ideology, the thought has remained a stranger... in spite of those true lovers who, as they look into each other's eyes, become aware that their thought and their joy are numerically one, not merely similar or identical..."

"The plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy... has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply that object..."

"The stages of human development are to strive for: (1) Besitz [Possession] (2) Wissen [Knowledge] (3) Können [Ability] (4) Sein [Being]"

"Nirvana is a state of pure blissful knowledge... It has nothing to do with the individual. The ego or its separation is an illusion. Indeed in a certain sense two "I"'s are identical namely when one disregards all special contents — their Karma. The goal of man is to preserve his Karma and to develop it further... when man dies his Karma lives and creates for itself another carrier."

"It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling, and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense — that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it... For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? what, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but, inconceiveable as it seems to ordinary reason, you — and all other conscious beings as such — are all in all. Hence, this life of yours... is, in a certain sense, the whole... This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula... 'Tat tvam asi' — this is you. Or, again, in such words as 'I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world.' Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you … For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end."

"No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors … This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory."

"We have just introduced the term gene for the hypothetical material carrier of a definite hereditary feature..."

"This life of yours which you are living is not merely apiece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear; tat tvam asi , this is you. Or, again, in such words as "I am in the east and the west, I am above and below, I am this entire world."

"But it is quite easy to express the solution in words, thus: the plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy, in which this is a fundamental dogma, has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply the object... 'You may suddenly come to see, in a flash, the profound rightness of the basic conviction of Vedanta: … knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sentient beings.'"

"In Darwin's theory, you just have to substitute 'mutations' for his 'slight accidental variations' (just as quantum theory substitutes 'quantum jump' for 'continuous transfer of energy'). In all other respects little change was necessary in Darwin's theory..."

"I met him frequently in later life, and, of all the physicists that I met, I think Schrodinger was the one that I felt to be most closely similar to myself. I found myself getting into agreement with Schrodinger more readily than with anyone else. I believe the reason for this is that Schrodinger and I both had a very strong appreciation of mathematical beauty, and this appreciation of mathematical beauty dominated all our work. It was a sort of act of faith with us that any equations which describe fundamental laws of Nature must have great mathematical beauty in them. It was like a religion with us. It was a very profitable religion to hold, and can be considered as the basis of much of our success."

"'If finally we look back at that idea of [Ernst] Mach [1838-1916], we shall realize that it comes as near to the orthodox dogma of the Upanishads as it could possibly do without stating it expressis verbis . The external world and consciousness are one and the same thing.'"

"You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality — if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality — reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. Their interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + amplifier + charge of gun powder + cat in a box, in which the psi-function of the system contains both the cat alive and blown to bits. Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation."

"Like Schopenhauer, he accepted an hierarchical view of our understanding of the world, with philosophy above and physics below."

"He rejected traditional religious beliefs (Jewish, Christian, and Islamic) not on the basis of any reasoned argument, nor even with an expression of emotional antipathy, for he loved to use religious expressions and metaphors, but simply by saying that they are naive."

"As everyone knows, wave mechanics was revived by Erwin Schrödinger. In his 1926 series of papers, ... the is suggested first, and then used to reserve the results of . Only later, in the sixth edition of the fourth paper, is a relativistic wave equation offered. According to Dirac, ... the history is actually quite different: Schrödinger first derived the relativistic equation, then became discouraged because it gave the wrong fine structure for hydrogen, and then some months later realized that the non-relativistic approximation to his relativistic equation was of value even if the relativistic equation was incorrect! By the time Schrödinger came to publish his relativistic wave equation, it had already been independently rediscovered by ... and , ... and for this reason it is usually called the '.'"

"The unity and continuity of Vedanta are reflected in the unity and continuity of wave mechanics. In 1925, the world view of physics was a model of a great machine composed of separable interacting material particles. During the next few years, Schrodinger and Heisenberg and their followers created a universe based on super imposed inseparable waves of probability amplitudes. This new view would be entirely consistent with the Vedantic concept of All in One."

"Just a few months after de Broglie's suggestion, Schrödinger took the decisive step... by determining an equation that governs the shape and the evolution of probability waves, or as they became known, s. It was not long before Schrödinger's equation and the probabilistic interpretation were being used to make wonderfully accurate predictions. By 1927, therefore, classical innocence had been lost. Gone were the days of a whose individual constituents were set in motion at some moment in the past and obediently fulfilled their inescapable, uniquely determined destiny. According to quantum mechanics, the universe evolves according to a rigorous and precise mathematical formalism, but this framework determines only the probability that any particular function will happen—not which future actually ensues."

"So if we're going to ask... What is life? ...Erwin Schrödinger wrote a famous book on that theme ...Two famous ideas ...emerged ...one ...was ...that genes are a code-script, and that was the first time anybody had used the word "code-script" or really thought in terms of information, in biology. ...This was before DNA was discovered. He was a direct inspiration to Watson and Crick and many others. The second theme... was how life maintains its organization over time, and why don't we just fall to pieces as entropy would tend to suggest... He talked about life feeding on negative entropy, or "negentropy"... [H]e talked about continually sucking order... from its environment. ...[I]t's a wonderful book. ...[H]e said, "If I had been catering for physicists alone I should have let the discussion turn on free energy instead." ...In more modern terms he's saying something like life is the harnessing of chemical energy in such a way that the energy-harnessing device makes a copy of itself. ...[H]e's linking the two key themes of biology ...information and energy together."

"His soft, cheerful speech, his whimsical smile are engaging. And Dubliners are proud to have a Nobel Prize winner living among them."

"we never experiment with just one electron or atom or (small) molecule. In thought-experiments we sometimes assume that we do."

"I insist upon the view that 'all is waves'."

"The multiplicity is only apparent. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not of the Upanishads only. The mystical experience of the union with God regularly leads to this view, unless strong prejudices stand in the way."

"God knows I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Everybody must jump on the bandwagon [Ausweg]. And actually not a year passed before it became an official credo, and it still is."

"If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts."

"When two systems, of which we know the states by their respective representatives, enter into temporary physical interaction due to known forces between them, and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described in the same way as before, viz. by endowing each of them with a representative of its own. I would not call that one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought. By the interaction the two representatives (or ψ-functions) have become entangled. [italics in the original]"

"Multiplicity is only apparent, in truth, there is only one mind..."

"Another way of expressing the peculiar situation is: the best possible knowledge of a whole does not necessarily include the best possible knowledge of all its parts, even though they may be entirely separate and therefore virtually capable of being "best possibly known," i.e., of possessing, each of them, a representative of its own. The lack of knowledge is by no means due to the interaction being insufficiently known—at least not in the way that it could possibly be known more completely—it is due to the interaction itself. Attention has recently been called to the obvious but very disconcerting fact that even though we restrict the disentangling measurements to one system, the representative obtained for the other system is by no means independent of the particular choice of observations which we select for that purpose and which by the way are entirely arbitrary. It is rather discomforting that the theory should allow a system to be steered or piloted into one or the other type of state at the experimenter's mercy in spite of his having no access to it. [italics in the original]"

"\frac{\partial \psi}{\partial t} = -\frac{2 \pi i}{h} E \psi"

"Although I think that life may be the result of an accident, I do not think that of consciousness. Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else."

"Conditions are admittedly such that we can always manage to make do in each concrete individual case without the two different aspects leading to different expectations as to the result of certain experiments. We cannot, however, manage to make do with such old, familiar, and seemingly indispensable terms as "real" or "only possible"; we are never in a position to say what really is or what really happens, but we can only say what will be observed in any concrete individual case. Will we have to be permanently satisfied with this...? On principle, yes. On principle, there is nothing new in the postulate that in the end exact science should aim at nothing more than the description of what can really be observed. The question is only whether from now on we shall have to refrain from tying description to a clear hypothesis about the real nature of the world. There are many who wish to pronounce such abdication even today. But I believe that this means making things a little too easy for oneself."

"Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world. If I say that there cannot be more than one consciousness in the same mind, this seems a blunt tautology — we are quite unable to imagine the contrary..."

"Reich believed that we needed to develop a whole new concept of sexuality. He viewed the body as an energy system in a constant state of expansion and contraction or pulsation (seen most easily, in the pulse and respiration)."

"Reich believed that, from the time of birth, everyone is endowed with the sexual capacity which is necessary to maintain a stable energy level in the organism and prevent stasis."

"Reich found in his research among the youth that only one-third were emotionally prepared for a sexual life, and one-third needed considerable information and counseling, while the remaining third required extensive therapy. It 's true that the majority of youth today have grown up with a better attitude toward sex but most without sufficient responsibility toward it."

"Reich was originally a strict Freudian and accepted Freud's theories, particularly regarding the libidinal development through the oral, anal, phallic, and genital stages and the concept of psychic energy. This concept holds that an individual is born with a given amount of psychic energy so that, the more it is bound up in fixation and repression at the various stages of growth, the less remains free for adult adjustment. Reich, I however, came to disagree with Freud on two important issues. Freud believed that culture and instinct were antithetical and that the baby was born with both libidinal and destructive drives. He believed, thus, that the destructive drive legitimately required repression for an orderly society and that, in the last analysis, society was correct in imposing such restrictions - otherwise, there would be chaos. Reich believed that the baby was born without destructive drives and with only the primary libidinal (love) drive, and that he was capable of regulating himself if allowed to function naturally. He believed that the destructive drives were a result of the repression of the libido, which then built up tension and pressure that could express themselves only forcefully and brutally. In this view, society is wrong in restricting the natural drives of the child, for it thus forces on him irrational and neurotic behavior. To Freud, psychic energy (or the libido) was simply a working hypothesis. Reich believed it was a real energy that required adequate discharge in order for a person to avoid the buildup of tension. He, eventually, was able to demonstrate this energy experimentally. If repression occurred, this energy was held back in muscular contraction (the armor). The contraction of the musculature tended to restrict and immobilize the body and became the somatic core of neuroses, making full orgastic discharge impossible."

"In the Polyclinic, Reich had the opportunity to study, with his students, hundreds of patients who came for treatment and to evaluate Freud's assertion that, when the unconscious conflicts were made conscious, the symptoms disappeared. He found that this did not always occur. Some of the most thoroughly analyzed cases remained in their neurotic morass or relapsed shortly. The problem then was to find out why. What factor was missing in the uncured cases that must be present in the cured ones? This factor proved to be that the latter had attained a satisfying sexual life, while the former had not. During analysis, symptoms frequently improved when the patient had a satisfying sexual experience or even masturbated with pleasure. Genital release was, therefore, necessary to maintain health. This did not mean that the uncured cases remained in abstinence, as many of them did have a sexual life. At that time, analysts simply took the patient's word for it that his sexual life was adequate and refrained from detailed probing. Reich found that all these patients suffered from sexual inadequacy consisting of premature ejaculation or orgastic impotence in the male and anesthesia or absence of orgasm in the female. The cured cases regularly achieved a pleasurable orgasm with total involvement of the body. This brought in the quantitative factor of discharge of libido or excess energy. This was significant, as it meant that the libido, which Freud had postulated as a psychic concept, is a reality. The libido must be a real energy which, unless discharged at more or less regular intervals, increases in the body, causing tension, and exciting the vegetative and vasomotor systems, causing nervousness, irritability, and other symptoms."

"Reich could only conclude that sex, which was formerly believed to be solely for reproductive purposes, had the vitally important function of maintaining a stable energy level within the organism."

"Dr. Wilhelm Reich was condemned for unscientific claims by the Food and Drug Administration in 1956 because of his theories about sexual freedom and his discovery of an alleged "orgone" energy. He quickly became the most world-famous victim of the FDA's quest to impose One True Faith on medical practice in the United States, because the Feds not only destroyed all the equipment in Dr. Reich's experimental laboratory but burned all his books, too, in an incinerator, and then they put him in jail where he died of a heart attack. Since many disapprove of this unconstitutional way of silencing heresy, Dr. Reich has remained a center of controversy. … In addition to his bio-physical heresies, Dr. Reich vastly offended many people by his sociological theory, which holds that fascism is just an exaggerated form of the basic structure of sex-negative societies and has existed under other names in every civilization based on sexual repression. In this theory, the character and muscular armor of the average citizen — a submissive and frightened attitude anchored in body reflexes — causes the average person to want a strong authority figure above them. Tyranny, in this model, is not created by tyrants alone but by neurotic masses who want tyrants."

"I really dread serious people. Especially serious, dogmatic people. I regard them as sort of what Reich called the emotional plague. I regard them as very dangerous."

"He had a great capacity to arouse irrational hatred obviously, and that's because his ideas were radical in the most extreme sense of the word "radical." His ideas have something to offend everybody, and he ended up becoming the only heretic in American history whose books were literally burned by the government. Timothy Leary spent five years in prison for unorthodox scientific ideas. Ezra Pound spent 13 years in a nuthouse for unorthodox political and economic ideas. Their books were not burned. Reich was not only thrown in prison, but they chopped up all the scientific equipment in his laboratory with axes and burned all of his books in an incinerator. Now that interests me as a civil liberties issue. When I started studying Reich's works, I went through a period of enthusiasm, followed by a period of skepticism, followed by a period of just continued interest, but I think a lot of his ideas probably were sound. A lot probably were unsound. And, I'm not a Reichian in the sense of somebody who thinks he was the greatest scientist who ever lived and discovered the basic secrets of psychology, physics and everything else, all in one lifetime. But I think he has enough sound ideas that his unpopular ideas deserve further investigation."

"(Gardner) writes about various kinds of cranks with the conscious superiority of the scientist, and in most cases one can share his sense of the victory of reason. But after half a dozen chapters this non-stop superiority begins to irritate; you begin to wonder about the standards that make him so certain he is always right. He asserts that the scientist, unlike the crank, does his best to remain open-minded. So how can he be so sure that no sane person has ever seen a flying saucer, or used a dowsing rod to locate water? And that all the people he disagrees with are unbalanced fanatics? A colleague of the positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer once remarked wryly "I wish I was as certain of anything as he seems to be about everything". Martin Gardner produces the same feeling."

"Wilhelm Reich has been incredibly misunderstood and maligned, and almost everything he has written has been misinterpreted. Particularly is this true of his sexual theories. The usual distortion is that he advocated "free" sexual expression - "obey that impulse" - amounting to a wild and frantic promiscuity ever seeking a mystical, ecstatic orgasm that is supposed to cure all neuroses and even physical ills. This could, presumably, be accomplished by sufficient practice and knowledge, and it would free everyone of his inhibitions and repressions. In order to achieve this end and, incidentally, to satisfy their own countertransference needs, Reich and his followers were said to masturbate their patients and to have sexual relations with them. (It was never explicitly stated whether homosexual relations were included; if not, then half of the patients must have felt neglected.) In any event, they conjured up an exceptional sexual prowess and lack of discrimination on the part of Reich and his followers. This distortion, of course, came from the sex-starved neurotic longing of some of the reviewers and readers of orgonomic literature, and surprisingly, even more from those who knew nothing of Reich and his writings. It was not based on anything Reich ever wrote or practiced. Actually, medical orgonomy as developed by Reich is a rather puritanical discipline. [Footnote 1] True, not entirely in keeping with the social mores of armored man, but puritanical nevertheless."

"I left behind me an age which had finally got hold of a little corner of the Freudian thought system, but had completely thrown overboard Freud's courage to stand alone, his adherence to some basic truth, his penetrating sense of what is right regardless— in other words, the complete abandonment of basic research of human emotions to petty little nuisance considerations such as career, easy money, easy recognition by institutions which owed their very existence to the evasion of the very facts of life they pretended, falsely, to disclose. p. n4"

"The fact that Freud did not offer any scientific proof for the libido theory, even though he predicted it would be forthcoming, and the attenuation that resulted from his later speculations, left his disciples with little to sustain them. As a result, they have gradually abdicated, despite some idolatrical lip service in their theoretical discussions — "a formal obeisance to the past" — and they have offered little, if any, opposition to the concerted effort now being directed against the energy theory, the most viable aspect of Freudian psychoanalysis. p. n9"

"Nothing can change as long as man is armored, since every misery stems from man's armoring and immobility which creates the fear of living, motile living. The orgonomic approach is neither political nor sociological alone; it is not psychological; it grew out of the criticism and correction of the psychological assumptions of psychoanalysis of an absolute unconscious, of the unconscious being the ultimate giveness in man, etc., and out of the introduction of bio-psychiatry into socio-economic thinking. It is biological and biosocial, resting on the discovery of the Cosmic Energy. p. 300"