Opening your mind can help end droughts

SOUTHERN California is in the grip of drought. In Los Angeles last week, friends pleaded with me to work a paranormal miracle on their dry atmosphere, where barely 25 per cent of the usual rain has fallen in the past 12 months.
The only solution I could offer was flippant: stage a Grand Slam tennis tournament.
''In London,'' I said, ''we guarantee a wet summer by holding Wimbledon. As soon as the racquet covers come off, the ground covers have to go on.''

If only it were that easy. Britain, where the worst effect of a dry-up is never more than a temporary ban on garden sprinklers and car washes, can not imagine the misery caused by real, bone-dry water shortages.

California's fiery drought, which has seen blazes run out of control across 75,000 acres and reduced many rural communities to subsisting on bucketfuls pulled from wells, is mirrored in southern Africa: millions face disease and starvation following another crop failure.

In Israel, which has seen six years of devastating drought in the past decade, some analysts fear total war with the Arab states will finally be provoked not by the Palestinian crisis but by water shortages.

I believe a paranormal solution does exist. But it is so extraordinary, based on technology that is so eerily unsettling, that governments will almost certainly prefer to see entire communities suffer untold hardship rather than admit the reality of this heretic science.

Its name is 'orgone biophysics'. The methods that underpin orgone research are so completely at odds with conventional science that, to admit the validity of the techniques, society must sweep aside many of its cherished beliefs about what makes the cosmos tick.

For me, that's no tough call. My misgivings are well-aired: I distrust the claims of scientists that cold, unemotional logic can unravel the mysteries of the cosmos.

But for the majority of Westerners, science has become a religion, and its central precepts are the gobbledegook of formulae: e=Mc2 is both a mathematical statement and a mantra.

Small wonder that the latest book by James DeMeo, director of research at the Orgone Biophysical Research Lab in Ashland, Oregon, is called Heretic's Notebook. DeMeo is an evangelist not only for orgone methodology but for the end of droughts.

His team has developed 'cloudbusters', which focus on congested negative energy in the atmosphere and dissipate it, allowing rain to fall.

The work is urgent, he insists: ''On a global basis, droughts and desert spreading have significantly increased over the last 100 years.

''New desert lands are today being created at an alarming pace, with around 60,000 to 70,000 square kilometres of additional new desert each year.''

In November 1991, when the Sea of Galilee had fallen to an all-time low, DeMeo took his cloudbuster team to Kfar Blum in north-east Israel.

A second machine was set up in Crete, and DeMeo hoped to combine the effects from both to bring desperately needed rain to the Holy Land.

Two weeks of frantic activity followed, as the Israeli cloudbuster, dubbed Sabra, was shifted from Kfar Blum to Tiberius, Tel Aviv and the Ein Gedi on the Dead Sea.

Heavy winds set in as the fog and stratus swirled, but the waters did not break until November 27, when a deluge began which broke 50-year records.

The West Bank and Jordan saw rainfall up to four times heavier than average, and thick snow fell in Turkey and Lebanon.

''The local populations in most cases celebrated the arrival of these storms, and endured the inconveniences and disruptions to daily life without complaint,'' DeMeo notes.

''Previously bone-dry river beds filled quickly and overflowed onto major roads - traffic often came to a standstill for hours.

Additional difficulties also occurred in a few areas when power lines were knocked down by heavy winds or accumulated snow, leaving many persons without power, sometimes for days.''

Because of these side-effects, and because also the cloudbusters can be dangerous to inexperienced operators, DeMeo is reluctant to explain exactly how to build or use one.

He warns of instances where novices have strayed into the discharge fields, where negative energy is emitted - cancers and even paralysis have resulted, he claims on his website at www.orgonelab.org

The most important factor concerns the moral fitness of the operators, something which would horrify any scientist who regards personal morality as an irrelevance in the lab.

Cloudbusters work effectively only when constructed and run by people who have rid themselves of anger and greed, who are capable of loving and supportive relationships with adults and children, who respect animals and who have healthy sex lives.

These are the precepts laid down by the discoverer of orgone energy, an Austrian medic named Wilhelm Reich, who fled the Nazis only to encounter bitter prejudice in the US.

He died in prison in 1957 after the Food and Drug Administration declared his theories fraudulent and ordered his writings to be burned.

Originally a Freudian, he believed that misdirected sexual energy was at the root of all ill health as well as dysfunctional societies.

Sexual theories, burned books, the rejection of conventional science, mysterious machines and the manipulation of energy fields - there's enough there to deter just about everyone.

So why write about it? Only this - it appears to work. And on a planet burning up with drought and hatred, that is reason enough.

The Jewish Telegraph

Uri Geller's Monthly column in the Face

Email him at urigeller@compuserve.com

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