It would appear that as babies and children we do not suffer from the illusion of being totally separate beings. We exist as a particular 'place' or 'focus' in the field of existence; energy and desire sweep through us, move us, and move on. The 'spastic ego' develops partly in order to protect this wide-open quality from the madness, hate and pain we find around us - to create a walled garden in the desert of patriarchal culture.

The tragic paradox is that putting a wall around the garden also cuts it off from its sources of life. Separateness is itself an illusion, an insanity; the barriers we put up to defend our natural love and joyfulness also defend us against nature itself. Isolation preserves our sanity, but also drives us mad.

This is simply a restatement in more 'metaphysical' language of what we have been saying throughout the book. Life energy naturally moves - and our skin does not constitute a boundary to that movement. One of the forms that this streaming of energy takes is the human need and desire for contact: contact with other humans, with our own internal life, and with the natural world around us. But that natural world is much larger and fuller than our walled-off adult perceptions suggest.

As we grow up, our perceptions are trained by what we are expected to see, hear and feel. When children show awareness of beings and forces which are invisible to the adults around them, those adults usually respond with fear ('there's something wrong with our child'), anger ('stop telling fibs') and incomprehension. As with sexuality, the child learns that this area of life is dangerous and not to be talked about In the long run, she usually learns not to see - and to half-forget that she ever could see.

When during therapy the armouring softens and starts to dissolve, so our barrier against the 'psychic' becomes softer and leakier; we begin to 'pick things up', to be more in touch with other people's thoughts and feelings, just as we are more in touch with our own. 'Picking things up' can happen in many other circumstances, especially with the use of certain drugs; some people do it all their lives. The focus on and trust in our own inner life which Reichian work develops will help dissolve intellectual assumptions about what we experience, and strengthen our grounded belief in what actually does happen. Rather than keeping 'psychic' experiences in a separate compartment of life, either as 'fantasy' or 'special', we are able to integrate them with the rest of life.

This sphere of perception is in fact profoundly ordinary, an unacknowledged part of all human interaction. People can get into a real confusion of paranoia and self-importance if they fail to recognise this ordinariness - to recognise that 'extrasensory perception' flowers out of the five senses, and no authentic distinction can be drawn between the two any more than a line can be drawn on our neck to separate head from body.

All the great teaching systems explain that 'psychic powers' are essentially a side-effect of something else, and that something else is what people often call 'spirituality'; the true realisation of the unity of all being. As it grows in us, not just as a head idea but as a reality, this knowledge brings up all our fear of deep contact. Psychics, spirituality, make us aware that we are not in fact separate beings, isolated egos in bags of skin. This is simultaneously a great joy and a great terror; the ego-illusion of separateness struggles to cling on, to save itself, to maintain the pretence.

You may notice a similarity between what we are saying here and our description in Chapters 4 and 6 of the eye segment and the Boundary character. It is when we are born that we have to face most starkly and brutally these issues of separation and openness. In the womb, the foetus is in a state of confluence with the mother's body; 'cosmic unity' is a bodily experience. At birth we must deal simultaneously with isolation - being cut off from our mother - and with invasion on sensory, physical and psychic levels. As we have said, Boundary characters, who are constantly dealing with these issues, are also often very sensitive to energy and to psychic phenomena. Because they tend also to be ungrounded, however, separate from their own bodies and terrified of invasion, their perception of psychic events tends to be confused and mixed with fantasy and paranoia.

The boundary position in each of us reacts in a similar way to the realisation of unity: it seeks to protect its barriers. There is the danger of what Chogyam Trungpa calls 'spiritual materialism'- an empty parody of genuine openness in which the ego is secretly congratulating itself on having 'let go of the ego'. It is fearfully easy either to become puffed up with your incredible psychic talent, or else to give the whole thing away to 'God' or to some guru in a pompous and insipid religiosity which is a defence against the simple here-and-now reality.

Both giving and receiving therapy seem to us forms of active meditation. They are about constantly letting go, constantly coming back to the core, to simplicity, to what is. For both of us, at the moment, there is a special sense of connection with Buddhism, in particular with Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism and its roots in shamanic tradition.

Shamanism is the archaic psychic tradition of our planet, which survives in essentially similar forms in many tribal cultures. With its focus on the body, on symbolic death and rebirth processes, on energy, on transformation, Reichian therapy is a thoroughly shamanic form of healing. As we go on with the work, it is sometimes as if we are discovering and re-owning all the ancient healing traditions of the world.

This was very much what happened to Reich himself - though he unfortunately lacked the background knowledge to realise it. Following through his clear and honest perceptions of energy in nature, he ended up totally out on a limb as far as 1950s Western culture was concerned; a true witch doctor, creating rain, distributing magical objects, exorcising, and alchemically processing exotic substances. Tragically, he went on insisting that his work was 'scientific', appealing for recognition from a scientific community which was hostile to everything he represented.

What we can most easily relate to in Reich's later explorations is his emphasis on the unity of nature and on our role as natural beings. He had a tremendous vision of the streaming of energy in the cosmos, the galaxies, the oceans, the weather - and in our own bodies. He saw it as the same energy, following the same patterns, the same dance. Although Reich condemned 'mysticism' - by which he meant flight from bodily reality - his own vision is in the best sense a truly mystical one.

Yet it is also highly concrete, and grew out of some very real and functional discoveries. 'Orgone' is not simply some vaguely uplifting notion, but an energy that can be directly felt by anyone who takes the trouble.

The simplest form of orgone device consists of several alternating layers of wool (such as an old blanket - not synthetic) and steel wool (the sort of stuff brillo pads are made of, obtainable from most hardware shops). This multi-layer sandwich is enclosed, for convenience, in a thin cotton cushion-cover. You will find that a distinct energy emanates from the top layer of steel wool; experienced by many people as warmth and tingling, it takes a few minutes to build up if you sit on the cushion or put your hand on it, a sensation which develops into a sense of 'fullness' and a natural desire to stop.

Many people have to train themselves to recognise orgone, but once we tune in to it the sensation is very recognisable - and closely akin to feelings we have during bodywork sessions. This is a natural life energy, which the cushion concentrates rather than creating. Children often sense the energy immediately, since they have no reason to think there's anything odd about it

Orgone energy in this form - a simple 'orgone accumulator'- charges up an organism. It is useful for states of exhaustion and lowness, the sort of time wheat we're vulnerable to colds and flu, and its use helps cuts, burns and so on to heal faster. Don't take our word for it - try it for yourself! Note that someone who is already overcharged will probably get a headache or other unpleasant effects from using the cushion. It shouldn't be applied to sensitive areas like head and heart for more than a few minutes, and when not in use it should be kept with the 'active' (steel wool) side face down or folded in on itself. Do not use the accumulator around colour TV, strip lighting, etc. - it will also concentrate this sort of energy.

The accumulator works much better, and produces a more pleasant feeling, on clear, fresh, blue-sky days, since it condenses and concentrates the energy which is in the atmosphere already. If the weather is oppressive and polluted, then so is the orgone energy. This is how Reich was led into working directly on the weather with other orgone devices - the 'cloudbuster' as he rather unfortunately named it, which we prefer to call a 'cloudmelter'. This implausible Buck Rogers mechanism, according to all the available evidence, actually works ...

We don't want to be drawn too far into the wonders of orgone physics, but we do want to make it clear that devices like this, unlike orthodox Western technology, cannot be separated from the feeling state of the people using them. In order to work effectively with the weather, a person needs to be in a sufficiently clear and open state to contact the condition of the atmosphere, to perceive how blocked or mobile it is - in fact, to give it a therapy session!

It seems to us that orgone may be not so much the life energy as a particular form of life energy. As Reich describes it, and as we ourselves experience it, orgone has some quite specific characteristics. It has a special relationship with water, which is why it links with water vapour in the atmosphere, and also why it 'streams', 'pools', 'condenses' and so on. It flows along the length of the human body, and is deeply bound up with orgasm. Other world traditions describe other types of life energy with properties which are similar but not identical: 'prana', chi' and so on cannot simply be identified with orgone, or with each other.

Similarly, just because many of the great healing systems describe energy centres in roughly the same areas of the body, it is not right to claim that they are all the same. The numbers, positions and descriptions of 'chakras' (a term from the yogic system only) can vary quite considerably. At the same time, though, it is rather striking how closely our system of segments parallels the yogic system of chakras.

Using Reichian work there are many other ways in which we re-contact concepts and experiences which are a familiar part of esoteric systems from around the world. We start to perceive and to work with the aura - the energy field surrounding the physical body, which is often more easily sensed in the hands than seen with the eyes. We become sensitive to earth energy, the force used by dowsers and the builders of stone circles and other ancient sacred sites. Many of these have an energy which is very reminiscent of orgone, and some at least are built on a similar principle of 'layering'. From Reichian therapy we can move in all sorts of directions into a new, rich universe.

We must however emphasise the difference of Reichian work, with its stress on being grounded in our own immediate experience, and in the reality of the body, from most esoteric, psychic and spiritual groupings. It is perilously easy even for experienced Reichians to 'take flight', to soar off into ungrounded fantasies and delusions as a means of avoiding the anxiety of authentic contact. Reich himself, in the last years of his life, seems to some extent to have lost touch with the commonsense ordinariness of life. It's also very easy to enter into a passionately enthusiastic transference relationship with some teacher or guru which you would never be able to leave unexamined with your therapist!

The teaching systems of the East in particular seem to rely on and use the positive transference relationship between disciple and guru as a means to an end, building up an intensity of need and fear which finally enables the disciple to break through to another level of understanding. It is hardly for us to question this process when properly carried out, but such worship and surrender is clearly open to profound abuse in the hands of a teacher whose own selfish ego, whose own character blocks, are still in command.

Seen from the more metaphysical viewpoint that we are using in this chapter, the underlying theme of the work we do is incarnation: choosing to be here, to be a body, with all the painful awkwardness and recalcitrance of the physical world. As we have said, it is often at birth that we most brutally face the pain of incarnation, and may wish - and try - not to be here. But incarnation is not something we do only once - it is a commitment that must be renewed over and over again as each crisis and challenge encourages us to retreat from life, to take refuge in illusions and fantasies.

Connection with the cosmos is not a matter of floating off into visions, but of engaging with thejoy and beauty of the real world - making our visions into reality. We have each chosen to be here; and our 'mission' seems to be to do with incarnating as much as possible of the beauty we can sense and imagine. Human beings are like trees, rooted in the ground, branches reaching up into the sky, trunk joining the two into a unity. Some people need to be anchored more strongly in the physical world; others need to be 'lifted' into greater awareness of the subtle, spiritual dimension of life. The goal is always ultimate wholeness.

Entering into this therapy doesn't commit you to believing in fairies and flying saucers! The work helps to put each person more in touch with their own authentic experience, enabling them at every point to test out what they are told, and what they seem to perceive, to an extent which is unusual in our brainwashed and beglamoured society. Letting go of compulsive defences, letting go of the cloud of anxiety which usually stands between us and the world, allows each of us to make our own choices about what to believe and what to explore.

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