Confusion over Cornillion/Bergier and Twigsnapper/Sarbacher

[Paul Schatzkin]

I found a copy of The Morning of the Magicians on line yesterday, and skimmed it again.

That book has been on the radar for years.

I've downloaded that .pdf to my iPad and will take a closer look...

I also added the paperback to my Amazon cart. I think that one warrants a hard copy.

Everything in it's own good time...

--PS

[natecull]

The Man Who Mastered Gravity has sold almost 3,000 copies on Amazon alone since it was released in March.

Yay! That's really great news!

As Jan and I have discussed, I've found (several) reason(s) over the past few months to question the provenance of all the e-mail I correspondence I started receiving in 2004 - which calls much of the narrative (if indeed you can call it that?) in the book into question. There are some 'tells' that imply that it call came from a single source, regardless of the sender's address or sign-off.

I guess I'm not surprised to hear that, because this story has always had a strong "Trickster" factor around it.

Actually, the words 'Caroline Group' first showed up in the very first snail-mail letter I received from 'Morgan.'

I've determined that the manner and tone of the first fifty-some pages of hard-copy correspondence I had with 'Morgan' (whoever-the-hell-he-was) differs from the 'tells' in the emails that started a couple of months later in the spring of 2004.

That's interesting! As I've said before, Morgan's story resonates with me strongly because I read the rough outlines of it back in either the late 1980s or early 1990s. From a set of notes being sold on the weird 'zine scene through either occult bookstores, or "back of Popular Science classified ads" mail order. One set of notes *might* have been by William Moore himself (I have the feeling in my memory that he was advertising those notes somewhere...), or they might have been by another researcher. I think there were several sets of such notes and researchers, honestly. A researcher - or group of them - attached to, say, the MUFON scene deeply going down the Townsend Brown rabbit hole circa 1990 might well have been still active in the mid 2000s.

The problem with personal memory (and me being a teenager at the time) is that things that really happened years apart get all smushed together. I know that I had the feeling reading some of the late 1980s Townsend Brown material that there was some kind of secret group behind Townsend and the (very lightly sketched and not by that name) "Morgan" character, and that William Stephenson and Eldridge Johnson and Ilya Tolstoy were key to that group somehow. But I feel that *why* those three should be important characters in Townsend's life, was never spelled out directly as such.

I was on BBS systems from about 1987 to 1997, yet oddly enough I don't recall any Townsend Brown material ever making its way to ASCII text BBS text files - it must have been a different crowd. It was all books and paper 'zines, and then from 1996 (my first Internet access) it was HTML pages and then, finally and slowly, PDFs.

Isn't that the "Adventures Unlimited Press" guy? He had an interesting racket going there for a while.

Yep, that's the one. A one-man vortex of weirdness in print. And I guess he was a backpacker way back when it was cool. Maybe started the genre of "New Age tourism"? An early mover in the genre, if nothing else.

Is that why Morgan told me to "stick with ball lightning" like spit on gum"?

I've heard variants of that phrase over the years from various UFO groups, and never really understood *why*, but yeah, ball lightning and plasma (plasmoids, particularly?) seems to be a thing that "insiders" keep hinting at. They might know something, or they might just be all reading the same books.

But I believe the person who coined the term "plasma" did so because he felt the stuff looked alive.

I've also wondered whether the exotic glowy, wispy stuff called "ectoplasm" by the Spiritualists back in the 1850s might not have been some kind of cold plasma, since they seemed to need darkness to make it visible. A St Elmo's Fire sort of thing. Except that it's also described in old books as being produced by the body, somehow, and we don't know of any mechanism by which that could happen. But still. It feels a little in the same ballpark.

I like your of of the word 'Theosophical.' Other activities in my life presently are drawing me toward that arena.

I wish you very safe and happy explorations of that arena! The Theosophical Society itself is... well, reading about it, it seems to have been a big and complicated group of people with many different viewpoints, which broke apart into many spinoff groups. I find myself a little attracted to some of the ideas in the big hall called "Esotericism", and repelled by others. Still sorting out which are which. But the idea of a big mostly-invisible living universe that we can interact with somewhat weakly (and through our minds more than our bodies, but sometimes through both)... that resonates with me. It seems to explain quite a lot of things in human history and religion and philosophy, with only a few hypotheses.

Now I need to go catch up on all the conversations I've missed. Cheers!

Nate

[natecull]

Ah, here's the plasma origin story. Irving Langmuir in 1927. A deliberately biological term borrowed to describe an electrical phenomenon.

Also, I didn't realise it was so late! Townsend Brown was already 22 when electrical plasma was named.

https://www.iter.org/newsline/266/1571

The word "plasma," derived from the ancient Greek "to mold," had been in use in medicine and biology for some decades when American chemist and physicist Irving Langmuir (1881-1957) began experimenting on electrical discharges in gas at the General Electric Research and Development Center in upstate New York.

In 1927, Langmuir was working with mercury vapour discharges, studying ion densities and velocity distribution in mercury arc columns. Working closely by his side, a younger physicist named Harold M. Mott-Smith was to remember in a 1971 letter he wrote to Nature how Langmuir finally suggested the word "plasma" to describe the particular distribution he was observing.

Langmuir and his team were acutely aware, as Mott-Smith wrote, that "the credit of a discovery goes not to the man who makes it, but to the man who names it," adding: "Witness the name of our continent," which was 'discovered' by Columbus but christened by the lesser figure Amerigo Vespucci.

The team spent days tossing around names to best describe what they had observed. But nothing came out of these brainstorming sessions until Langmuir "pointed out that the equilibrium part of the discharge acted as a sort of substratum carrying particles of special kinds, like high-velocity electrons [...] molecules and ions of gas impurities"—just in the same way blood plasma carries around red and white cells, proteins, hormones and germs.

Langmuir "proposed to call our uniform discharge a 'plasma.' Of course, we all agreed," writes Mott-Smith. It took some time, however, for the science community to adopt a word from the field of medicine and biology and give it a different meaning. "The scientific world of physics and chemistry looked askance at this uncouth word and were slow to accept it in their vocabulary [...] Then all of a sudden, long after I had left the laboratory, to my pleased surprise, everybody started to talk about plasmas."

[Paul Schatzkin]

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Thanks, Nate, for pointing this out:

A deliberately biological term borrowed to describe an electrical phenomenon.

Also, I didn't realise it was so late! Townsend Brown was already 22 when electrical plasma was named.

Hmm.

I've been thinking of late – in a very abstract, formless way – about the intersection of biology and physics.

I did not realize that the term 'plasma' – to describe an electrical condition – was repurposed in the same way that "fission' was borrowed from cellular biology to describe splitting atoms.

On some level, there must be an integration, because all the cells in the organisms that host "intelligence" are themselves comprised of molecules and atoms and their quantum particles and fields and vacua.

That's about as far as I've gotten.

--PS

[Jan Lundquist]

Yes, Nate, the quest to understand this is what keeps me hooked.

What it felt like to be at the vortex of the fairly freewheeling defense/research culture which was open to wild and new ideas, at the same time as it was trying to standardise and button-down a new physics.

Because we have been watching Strange Angel, the two season show about Rocket pioneer and Thelemite magician, Jack Parsons (1914-1952), I looked at his bio, and who crops up but L. Ron Hubbard. What a messy nest Pasadena was in those days and what a sad denouement for a too-short life.

Parsons was expelled from JPL and Aerojet in 1944 owing to the Lodge's infamous reputation and his hazardous workplace conduct.

In 1945, Parsons separated from Helen, after having an affair with her sister Sara; when Sara left him for L. Ron Hubbard, Parsons conducted the Babalon Working, a series of rituals intended to invoke the Thelemic goddess Babalon on Earth. He and Hubbard continued the working with Marjorie Cameron, whom Parsons married in 1946. After Hubbard and Sara defrauded him of his life savings, Parsons resigned from the O.T.O., then held various jobs while acting as a consultant for Israel's rocket program. Amid McCarthyism, Parsons was accused of espionage and left unable to work in rocketry. In 1952, Parsons died at the age of 37 in a home laboratory explosion that attracted national media attention; the police ruled it an accident, but many associates suspected suicide or murder.[2]

Every time I see Hubbard's name, I am angry all over again at Beau, for having shared the E-meter with him. Without that, there would be no Scientology.

But the idea of a big mostly-invisible living universe that we can interact with somewhat weakly (and through our minds more than our bodies, but sometimes through both)... that resonates with me. It seems to explain quite a lot of things in human history and religion and philosophy, with only a few hypotheses.

I think this Other,that is not really other from us, responds to our hearts more than our minds, but the connection is strongest when our hearts and minds are aligned.



Paul, congratulations on the milestone sales! I will try to post something to the blog, here shortly.

TMoTM is a dense read, information is all over the place, very little of it directly pertinent to Townsend. Though my antennae twigged when Bergier asked Fulcanelli if his work was aimed at transmuting base metals into gold, like that "of Dr. Miethe" but he may have been referring to someone other than (rumored) AVRO Saucer Miethe.

I did not realize that the term 'plasma' – to describe an electrical condition – was repurposed in the same way that "fission' was borrowed from cellular biology to describe splitting atoms.

And the word "stress" was borrowed from Civil Engineering by the medical profession to describe the many results of sustained dissonance on the physical body. Fritz Albert Popp saw the effects of it working down at the level of biophotonic light.

https://www.academia.edu/1901658/About_ ... ss_Germany

(He and Robert Becker seem to have been on a similar "Electric Body" trail, a theory held by Mason Rose, as reported by Cornillion in the fifties).

If find yourself being pulled/pushed some new metaphysical ideas, follow what lights you up and leave the rest behind. As The Astrologer says, "We are all popes in our own religion."

[Paul Schatzkin]

Thanks for all that, Nate. Very interesting stuff to try to follow.

And this was an excellent note to land on:

... the idea of a big mostly-invisible living universe that we can interact with somewhat weakly (and through our minds more than our bodies, but sometimes through both)... that resonates with me. It seems to explain quite a lot of things in human history and religion and philosophy, with only a few hypotheses.

Yeah, well, that's what's resonating with my now, too.

It really started years ago when this woman, Pru Clearwater, organized a music show she called "The Infinite Field"
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Don't laugh, but the inspiration for the show was a spiritual encounter Pru had with a sea turtle while snorkeling in the Virgin Islands (I think).

In a town that is marinated in country and Americana music, this show was a departure, drawing on several genres to deliver a spiritual message about how we are all... how did the Dali Lama put it when ordering a pizza?... "one with everything."

Pru was a pretty good friend (and excellent photo subject/model), and we got to talking about what she'd set out to do with the show. This was ca. 2006, when I was still marinating in the whole TTB business. Coming from that intellectual space, I offered her the 'quantum' explanation for her message. It went something like this:

At the microcosmic level, there is 'space' between the nucleus and electrons in every atom. All of the subatomic particles float or orbit or zip around in that space. And there is just the ONE space, the ONE quantum void in which all those particles exist.

And at the macrocosmic level, the all the seemingly infinite space between the planets and the stars and the galaxies.... it's the same space, the same quantum/cosmic void.

The quantum void. The Dirac Sea. The Plenum. The Infinite Field.

And there is only one such void in the entire universe and everything we know floats with in it.

There is probably a New Religion in there somewhere. I am neither smart nor diabolical enough to start it.

--PS

[Paul Schatzkin]

As The Astrologer says, "We are all popes in our own religion."

LOL.

I did not see that before posting that last crack about a "New Religion."

Smart man, that Astrologer.

--P

P.S. It occurs to me that we've got a whole new theme running here that has nothing to do with the topic of the thread. I'll think about juggling some posts into a new thread...(well, maybe).

[natecull]

Don't laugh, but the inspiration for the show was a spiritual encounter Pru had with a sea turtle while snorkeling in the Virgin Islands (I think).

That's very cool! And yes, spiritual encounters come in odd places. I think I've had one through assembling music collages, which... well, it's hard to explain, but yes, the creative instinct seems to have an aspect to it that goes beyond words. When you think you're just playing with shiny junk you found in an Internet dumpster, but then something whispers wordlessly in the back of your mind, and when you follow its suggestions you find things clicking into a larger pattern you hadn't seen but that makes you shiver when you get it... well, I can understand why the Greeks talked about "muses" as if they were beings that exist. There's something there beyond us, I'm sure of it.

Regards, Nate

[Paul Schatzkin]

There's something there beyond us, I'm sure of it.

Not beyond us.

Within us.

As Liz Gilbert says in the second Epigram that opens the book:
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That "supreme intelligence" dwells .... in the Infinite Field.

Amen.

Now, please pass the collection plate.

--PS