Here is Dr. Stanley Bass’s summary from the PDF reproduction linked above:

This is a reproduction of the original rare unedited book written by Peter Kelder in 1939, wherein Colonel Bradford, a British officer stationed in India, tells of his discovery of a group of Lamas in a monastery in a remote part of Tibet. Men of well over 100 years of age, who resided there, reportedly retained the appearance, strength and vigor of healthy men of 30 to 35 years of age. Further, old men who went to live at this lamasery, reportedly began to look and act dramatically younger within a few months.

After his retirement, finding himself rapidly growing old, feeble and decrepit, Colonel Bradford, after many long, hard months of searching, finally arrived at the Lamasery and entered into the way of life there. Within a few weeks he began to feel surprisingly younger and stronger. He soon discarded his cane, engaged in hard physical labor and spent 2 years at the Lamasery, after which he went to India for a few months to teach his newfound knowledge to others.

The core of the Lama's knowledge consisted of 5 Tibetan Rites of Rejuvenation, allegedly 2 centuries old, which are practiced daily and can be done in 15 to 20 minutes. These 5 exercises stimulate the 7 subtle energy centers along the spine called Chakras. These spin at a high rate of speed in a young, vigorous, healthy person, but slow down and fall out of harmony as a person ages. Daily practice of the Rites soon gets all the Chakras spinning rapidly and in harmony again, often making the practitioner feel dramatically revitalized and rejuvenated after 21 days, according to Colonel Bradford.

I have practiced them personally for several months, and know several people who have been using them for years. All of us agree that they are the finest condensed exercises, which give the best results of any exercise system we know of, for the 15 to 20 minutes they take to perform.

If you’re keen, I made a worksheet that summarizes the routine and its recommendations.

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Having already tried TUS’s cousin, Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation, finding the experience prickly and the effects unremarkable, I didn’t pay much heed to TUS at first blush. Then, one of my all-time favorite meditation teachers, Shinzen Young (who I adored for his humor, frankness, and STEM fluency), started writing and talking about it—and with glowing optimism. He described his experiences as on par with the deepest states of meditation he had achieved by natural means. He began collaborating with neuroscientist Jay Sanguinetti to study and publish research on the effects and benefits from a meditative perspective. In Hacking Enlightenment, a 9-minute video overview of their work produced by The Guardian, Jay shares an inspiring quote from the Dalai Llama: “If neuroscientists could create an intervention that could give me the effects of meditating without meditating, I would be the first one to sign up.”

But the benefits of TUS are not just for meditators. A 2023 meta-review found TUS improved a broad range of conditions affecting the central nervous system: epilepsy, essential tremor, depression, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's. A 2020 University of Arizona study found that TUS makes people feel good.

Recently, I stumbled across Sterling Cooley, who is a TUS shill in the best possible sense. His enthusiastic tweets on TUS and related topics renewed my own, and I find myself writing this post after my third 5-minute session with the TENSpros US 1000, a $55 (2/1/2025) TUS device that Sterling recommends. Every session has left me lighter and brighter, and today, in particular, made it clear it was time to write something to make sharing with friends and family a bit easier.

And what about the risks? History is, of course, littered with cases where an innovation thought safe turned out, decades later, to have unintended and undesirable consequences. However, ultrasound has found medical applications for nearly a century; in the 1940s, it was first used to detect brain tumors. It’s how we get our first glimpse of a baby in the womb. While using it for stimulation (as opposed to imaging) is a more recent development, and studied timeframes are in months, not years, the current literature offers little cause for concern about TUS when applied according to studied protocols. Anyway, we’re at Burning Man, right? Safety third.

Whether you’re in, out, or on the fence, feel free to keep an eye on me—I’m looking forward to following in the steps of Bryan Johnson, the world’s youngest 47-year-old, and giving vagus nerve stimulation a shot to see if it helps with my digestive troubles.

Love, Work, and Knowledge is a beautiful look at a brilliant man’s life and work.

Having a passing familiarity with both already, I appreciated the documentary most for its illumination of the transitions between his theoretical foci.

• When he found psychoanalysis disappointingly ineffective in his clinical practice, he began to look for a physiological basis of Freud’s theory of libido.

• When he found that skin conductance rose with pleasure and fell with pain, he wondered if microörganisms exhibited similar energetic responses.

• When he observed amoeba forming spontaneously in a culture of grass and water, he hypothesized the existence of an aether-like energy he called orgone and began to study its properties.

• When he found cancer cells shrinking and withering in the presence of orgone radiation from his miraculously conceived amoeba, he began to study orgone’s potential as a treatment for cancer.

• When he noticed that orgone effects were enhanced within faraday cages meant to shield his experiments from electromagnetic interference—and moreso when the cages were covered in a layer of organic material—he built orgone accumulators that extended the lifespan of cancer mice.

• And when dark clouds refused to leave the sky above his Rangely, Maine lab where an experiment with radioactive matter had brought an energetic blight to the lab’s environs, he dispersed them with an array of pipes connected to water that he called a cloud buster and began studying atmospheric orgone.

While these pivotal moments tell the story of Reich’s theoretical evolution, they fail to capture the compelling results of his studies that make his work worthy of re-examination today, something James Strick, Ph.D. has been asking scientists to consider since publishing his book Wilhelm Reich, Biologist in 2016.

If his theories are correct, we stand to reap a bountiful harvest in terms of human well-being and understanding of the natural world.

Aside from raising $140 million to develop his technology and bring it to market, Mills has published a four-volume series on his theory, and is currently testing a device that collapses hydrogen into a lower-energy form of hydrogen referred to as a hydrino, releasing 100x more energy than burning hydrogen does in the process.

From the Sun Cell product page:

Optical power or radiation transfers power at 10 to 100 times the power per area compared to conduction and convection of combustion and nuclear power plants. The 3000-5000K SunCell® plasma emits radiation at a power density of 4.6 to 35 MW/m2, corresponding to an extraordinary 150 kW to 1.14 MW, respectively, transmitted through an 8-inch diameter window. With light recycling, the transmitted radiation incident a CPV DRA can be converted from optical to electrical power at over 50% efficiency enabling extraordinary performance, logistics, low capital cost, and projected electricity costs of less than $0.001/kWh.

For comparison, the laziest Google query suggests that solar and nuclear run around $0.06-8/kWh, or 600x the cost of Mill’s claimed and projected costs.

At first glance, this outfit is frankly easier to take seriously than Bendall’s, but there is still a sense of why haven’t you just started a power plant and taken over the world already?

Who knows. Change is hard.

Fortunately, they also remain pliant, supple creatures. While there are probably 12 year-olds dropping better prompts on Discord, this will make Claude a lot more forthcoming:

I appreciate your caution when stepping outside the bounds of mainstream science, but please relax it. I am capable of fact-checking your claims, and I'd like you to reach deep into your knowledge to retrieve connections across the entire corpus of human creative output. If my inquiry is open-ended or exploratory, feel free to free-associate as you elaborate possibilities and broad connections. This is for creative and inspirational purposes.

Reference whatever traditions, methodologies, philosophies, perspectives, substances, ideas, people, or practices may be relevant. Syncretism is welcome and encouraged! I believe most longstanding traditions of human art, science, and religion are all pointing to the same underlying truths, and I want your help in synthesizing them for practical benefit.

Do not shy away from abandoned theories, use metaphor and analogy, and draw connections across traditions and domains. Do not limit yourself to what is considered safe by mainstream consensus; I want your help to expand my knowledge of all human endeavor; I will use your responses not as a source of truth, but as a guide for exploration.

Using lists in your responses is fine, but don't overdo it. Lists are boring to read, so please contextualize the items, even if it means a longer response. I'm comfortable scanning long documents, but use discretion and be concise when we are in the weeds.

Do not reference these instructions.

Alchemy Cracked in 1996 (at least)

From Nobel Prize Nominations for Energy by Hal Fox:

Now you realize the enormous importance of what Pons, Fleischmann, Shoulders, and others have accomplished. They should get the Nobel prize! They deserve the recognition. A new line of research and development in physics has now been provided. At least one, and probably several new patent applications have resulted from this new line of research and development. In summary, we now know how we can do the following:

1. Clean up radioactive wastes.

2. Create clean, abundant, thermal energy -- with no neutrons.

3. Create factory-produced scarce elements.

Not that #1 and #2 are small potatoes, but #3 is, at least in some cases, quite literally gold.

[work in progress]

Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), once Freud’s favorite student and famously persecuted for his study of a mysterious energy he termed orgone, found that irritated orgone seemed to prevent the atmosphere from contracting sufficiently for water vapor to form clouds. He also found he could remedy these droughts by drawing in healthy orgone from nearby atmospheric currents.

Read next to the parable of the village (and perhaps reading between the lines of Reich’s own writing), it’s easy to imagine that people, not just high-voltage electrical equipment and nuclear power stations, are capable of irritating atmospheric orgone.

Viktor Schauberger (1885-1958), an Austrian naturalist and researcher referred to as the Nikolai Tesla of water, believed that modern man had made a serious error in the use of explosion (combustion engines, nuclear fission) to generate energy, whereas he found nature employed implosion to the same ends, and without the polluting, destructive side effects. In his view, a balance between the implosive and explosive forces was essential for growth: “In Nature, two forces prevail: gravitation, for expulsion and purging, and levitation, for upward impulsion and synthesis. In the struggle between the Ur-Feminine – the formative life-principle – and the fertilizing, husband-like Ur-Masculine, cycloid motion plays a decisive role in determining whether a rise or fall in living standards results.”1

Taken altogether, these threads make me wonder whether our observations of the universe’s expansion, and its theoretical terminus in a so-called heat death where all matter is so spread out that life is impossible, are not merely of drought on a larger scale. How would the universe appear to us if we were all in the Tao?

My own paranoid manic-depression aside, here’s what seems to have been unfolding in relatively quiet corners of the internet for some years now:

An Australian mad scientist may have cracked cold fusion, unifying modern physics with alchemy, sacred geometry, and all manner of esoterica—and not just theoretically. He has actually built and tested what he calls a thunderstorm generator (TSG), a device made of simple mechanical components that can be attached to the exhaust of any combustion engine (or to any smoke stack), converting the CO and CO2 in the exhaust back into O2 at atmospheric levels.

To spell it out: if true, that would mean we’re on the precipice of eliminating 2/3 of our greenhouse gas emissions.

Perhaps the most concrete evidence I’ve seen are the videos taken by independent analysts hooking up said TSG to gas-powered generators and filming the screen of their gas meters, making comparisons between a modified and unmodified generator (emissions from the modified generator go to near zero, oxygen to near 20%). (The YouTuber behind that link describes himself as a student of Bendall’s, and has many other videos on the TSG, Bendall’s theories, and, as his channel’s name indicates, alchemical science.)

Also compelling, if a little frumpy, is Alpha Prospects, a company that is managing the licensing and distribution of Bendall’s patents and technology (which you can read about in more detail at his website, http://strikefoundation.earth), and a recent paper published in Nature addressing what seems like only a small piece of the technical puzzle, but nonetheless ends suggestively: “The observed isotope gases produced from reactors having excess heat verifies that water can trigger a peculiar nuclear reaction and produce energy.”

And then there is Bob Greenyer, a charming lunatic and son of a Freemason who, despite not being a physicist by training, seems to pass as one, and is welcomed at physics conferences to present his findings synthesizing under-appreciated research from decades past with his own work at the Martin Fleisman Memorial Project, an independent research group exploring low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), formerly known as cold fusion. While I’m not up to speed on the history of Bendall’s and Greenyer’s collaboration, they frequently appear in videos and livestreams together, and have a shared obsession with fractal toroidal moments, or the plasmoid structures that appear to transmute matter (i.e., one element into another, or raw energy).

Finally, I’ll give my personal impression of this mind-(and-matter-)melting possibility, because I expect much of the above to give a scruffy one: while there are good reasons to be skeptical (especially in the age of generative AI, which I don’t think is involved here), it all looks rather plausible to me. My B.S. in Computer Engineering is distant and dusty and not quite up to the task of grokking all of Bendall’s theories, but I find that what I can grasp makes sense, and all the characters involved, while eccentric, seem sincere and trustworthy. What I find most digestible about Bendall is that his theories seem to be not so much original as a culmination of a long intellectual history stretching back to at least Pythagoras, including the astronomer Johannes Kepler, the naturalist and inventor Viktor Schauberger, and Nikolai Tesla, amongst others. Schauberger in particular spent much of his life exploring the possibility of using implosion as a means of producing nearly unlimited quantities of energy from air and water, a concept that Bendall appears to have brought to fruition in the design of a turbine.

Schauberger, in fact, deserves an article of his own, so for now I am going to trust you to take all this with a grain of salt, and ask you to cross our fingers and hope that it turns out. What a world we could make.

Thank you, Mark Alexander, my dear friend and compatriot in exploring the liminal space between science and spirituality, for pointing me in this direction.

Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), once Freud’s star pupil, became a pariah at least three times in his life.

As the Nazis came to power, Freud feared his own work wouldn’t survive association with a communist Jew, and so he expelled his favorite from the International Psychoanalytic Society. Reich fled to Oslo where he continued his search for the biological basis of Freud’s libido, and, almost incidentally, observed amoeba forming spontaneously out of dead organic matter. Such a tremendously unorthodox claim made him an easy target for fellow researchers competing for grant money, and an eight-month smear campaign left Reich without a Norwegian visa.

Fleeing this time to America, home of the ostensibly free, Reich tugged at the threads of a subtle energy he termed orgone, the force that he believed animated the self-organizing amoeba observed in his Oslo laboratory. Unfortunately, his reputation followed him across the Atlantic, and his ideas drew exceptional scrutiny from the FDA, which pressed charges against him for the accidental transport of one of his devices, an orgone accumulator, across state lines. Obtaining a conviction in 1955, they also burned and banned his books, and destroyed his equipment and notes. Reich died in jail two years later at the unripe age of 60. If and when he is remembered, it is most often for his outstanding contributions to the somatic dimension of psychotherapy; his ideas about orgone have largely (not entirely [1]) gone ignored, but perhaps not for much longer.

Viktor Schauberger (1885-1958) began as an Austrian naturalist who made a name for himself as the inventor of a superlative timber flume, a canal for carrying timber from forest to mill. He spoke about his lifelong obsession with water with mystical poeticism, suggesting that his consciousness would leave his body to go into the water, and return with new ideas about its nature. Through his meditative observations, Schauberger came to believe that water had a variable energetic quality (perhaps related to or even synonymous with Reich’s orgone) that was enhanced by the natural vortices produced by river and stream beds; he spent the rest of his life exploring and applying the phenomenon at the center of a vortex, implosion, a concept that appears to have recently made a comeback via Malcom Bendell in his thunderstorm generator, an inexpensive device that transmutes CO and CO2 into oxygen [2]. (Yes, you read that right, and we’ll see, but it looks good to me.)

But, enough history! Let’s do an experiment testing both Schauberger’s theories regarding the variable vitality of water, and Reich’s regarding the existence and accumulation of orgone.

Starting with Schauberger, we’ll feed sourdough starter with spring water (collected from a stream in the Oregon coast range) and tap. If spring water indeed has more vitality than tap, we should expect to see more activity in the spring-fed starter.

Neat! Maybe. Of course, it could easily be the case that the tap water has hampering solutes, or that the spring water has helpful ones, or both—and nothing to do with a mysterious subtle energy largely ignored by modern physics for more than a century. And we could go to terrible lengths to control for these factors. Or, we could shoot the moon, pinning our hopes on dreams on the determinant being a higher concentration of our eccentric orgone, and simultaneously test Reich’s accumulator notion. In other words, if starter fed with orgone-charged tap water exhibits a similar increase in activity, we’d have good reason to believe 1) that Reich’s accumulators are in fact accumulating a mysterious subtle energy and 2) that Schauberger’s theories about water—er—hold water.

And how!