May 25

Through My Eyes

Sunday May 25

(Let's read some more together of the Kirlians. I wanted to bring us this Friday but the spinning took a bit longer than I expected!)

" After their photographic demonstration of pathology in the leaf from the sick plant for the Muscovite visitor, it was another ten years before the Kirlians began to emerge from obscurity in the USSR.

In the early 1960s Dr. Lev Fedorov of USSR's Ministry of Public Health, struck by the possibilities of the new photography for medical diagnosis, awarded the Kirlians a first research grant but when Fedorov died soon thereafter, official funding from Moscow began to dwindle and academic skeptics were once more in control.

It was only when a journalist took up the Kirlians' story that interest was again aroused. "This situation, " wrote I.Belov, "is as bad as before the revolution , when the evil hand of Tsarist bureaucrats determined there was too much uncertainty in novelty. Twenty-five years have passed since the Kirlians made their discovery, yet the Ministries in charge still haven't released the funds."

Belov's effort had its effects. In 1966, a conference bringing together many scientists interested in all aspects of what was coming to be called "biological energy" was held in Alma Ata , capital of the Kazakh Republic. In proceedings of the conference entttled Problems in Bioenergetics, a Moscow biophysicist, Viktor Adamenko, joined with the Kirlians to author a seminal paper "On Research of Biological Objects in High Frequency Electrical Fields." the paper stressed the enormous difficulties of studying the spectrum of "electrobioluminesence: but added that when these are overcome, "we will be able to obtain important information about bioenergetic processes in a living organism

For all the mounting Soviet interest, it was another three to four years before American science- which had labelled as fake Wilhelm Reich's 1939 discovery of a life energy in plants and humans which he called orgone- paid attention to the new developments. What attracted this attention was not the Soviet scientific publications but a book, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, by two North American journalists, Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, which appeared in the summer of 1970."

( Science going down the path that shamans and mystics long have travelled. Wilhelm Reich was one of the great pioneers of bioenergetics. Schroeder and Ostrander wrote another book called Superlearning which is pretty fascinating in which they describe Soviet investigations into rapid learning, particularly of languages. We may be able to use some of those ideas! I'm going to add to our wildflowers now.) I promise to add more tomorrow...

Through my eyes

* This is,of course, more from The Secret Life of Plants!


	Through My Eyes Sunday May 25 (Let's read some more together of the Kirlians. I wanted to bring us this Friday but the spinning took a bit longer than I expected!) " After their photographic demonstration of pathology in the leaf from the sick plant for the Muscovite visitor, it was another ten years before the Kirlians began to emerge from obscurity in the USSR. In the early 1960s Dr. Lev Fedorov of USSR's Ministry of Public Health, struck by the possibilities of the new photography for medical diagnosis, awarded the Kirlians a first research grant but when Fedorov died soon thereafter, official funding from Moscow began to dwindle and academic skeptics were once more in control. It was only when a journalist took up the Kirlians' story that interest was again aroused. "This situation, " wrote I.Belov, "is as bad as before the revolution , when the evil hand of Tsarist bureaucrats determined there was too much uncertainty in novelty. Twenty-five years have passed since the Kirlians made their discovery, yet the Ministries in charge still haven't released the funds." Belov's effort had its effects. In 1966, a conference bringing together many scientists interested in all aspects of what was coming to be called "biological energy" was held in Alma Ata , capital of the Kazakh Republic. In proceedings of the conference entttled Problems in Bioenergetics, a Moscow biophysicist, Viktor Adamenko, joined with the Kirlians to author a seminal paper "On Research of Biological Objects in High Frequency Electrical Fields." the paper stressed the enormous difficulties of studying the spectrum of "electrobioluminesence: but added that when these are overcome, "we will be able to obtain important information about bioenergetic processes in a living organism For all the mounting Soviet interest, it was another three to four years before American science- which had labelled as fake Wilhelm Reich's 1939 discovery of a life energy in plants and humans which he called orgone- paid attention to the new developments. What attracted this attention was not the Soviet scientific publications but a book, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, by two North American journalists, Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, which appeared in the summer of 1970." ( Science going down the path that shamans and mystics long have travelled. Wilhelm Reich was one of the great pioneers of bioenergetics. Schroeder and Ostrander wrote another book called Superlearning which is pretty fascinating in which they describe Soviet investigations into rapid learning, particularly of languages. We may be able to use some of those ideas! I'm going to add to our wildflowers now.) I promise to add more tomorrow... Through my eyes * This is,of course, more from The Secret Life of Plants!