Conversation
@dalem awhile back I went down a bit of a rabbit hole with psychotronics but it seems like most of it is stuff that is only available in Czech (unsurprising since it's extremely fringe) so I could only learn very superficial stuff about it and whatever the literal CIA has to say on the subject. I found that a lot of the books that were written on it in the original Czech though are fairly easily acquired since it was all done more openly and with more state backing in the Soviet Union. I don't think I could justify learning a whole ass language to do this but it's been one of my pet project obsessions to try to learn more about adapting their theory and tech for DIY psionics.
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@nyx
Thankfuly I am Polish, which means there is quite a bit of stuff related to it in my native language, we even have a psychotronic society (although nowadays it's just soykaf), The topic is very interesting, and I have been thinking of translating some materials to english. If you have any questions about it, I would be happy to answer according to my ability and knowledge.
Thankfuly I am Polish, which means there is quite a bit of stuff related to it in my native language, we even have a psychotronic society (although nowadays it's just soykaf), The topic is very interesting, and I have been thinking of translating some materials to english. If you have any questions about it, I would be happy to answer according to my ability and knowledge.
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@dalem yeah I figured with you being Polish you'd have much more access to info on psychotronics so I would be extremely interested to pick your brain about this. two things that come to mind, 1). since you mentioned that there are groups in Poland that study stuff like this, does interest in psychotronics end up having the same problem that most parascience stuff has in the west where it's all kind of like woo nonsense that isn't seriously engaged in the "-science" part of parascience? and 2). something that is pretty fundamental to a lot of parascience stuff in the west that isn't outright traditional magick and occultism (which is more of my main wheelhouse) is essentially attempting to take seriously and understand a concept of the life force or vital energy that is pretty standard in Eastern religions (in China it's called Qi, in India it's Prana) as something that can be directly manipulated using psychic practices that can be aided with machines. does psychotronics have a similar approach/foundations?
I would be really interested to try to document and consolidate more info on this stuff because psychotronics is the sorta thing where if we assume that there is a real scientific basis to it that is worth studying, the best way to make progress with that (unless one wants these things to remain intentionally clandestine which is also a possibly reasonable stance to take) would be to essentially crowdsource data and experimentation on it since obviously this is not the sort of thing any institutions these days would ever touch or talk about (except maybe for whatever Cold War programs might still exist).
I would be really interested to try to document and consolidate more info on this stuff because psychotronics is the sorta thing where if we assume that there is a real scientific basis to it that is worth studying, the best way to make progress with that (unless one wants these things to remain intentionally clandestine which is also a possibly reasonable stance to take) would be to essentially crowdsource data and experimentation on it since obviously this is not the sort of thing any institutions these days would ever touch or talk about (except maybe for whatever Cold War programs might still exist).
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@nyx
Happy to answer everything!
Yes absolutely, from my experience psychotronics are mostly full of two types of bullshit:
- Mentally ill people clinging to it because of like targeted electronics weapons or whatever bullshit, you know the drill (pretty sad)
- Weird tinfoil hat, alternative medicine kinds, often just a general new-age style mixture of astrology, pseudo "eastern esoterics" and using random language from quantum physics for no apparent reason
There is very little people who treat it seriously, or even treat it as what it actually is.
For example the polish psychotronic society's website is full of GenAI bullshit and just very low quality materials: https://psychotronicy.org
Another site akin being: https://psychotronika.pl/
I don't think you even need to understand the language to see it's pure and utter new-age bullshit. It is mostly used to scam people off from feeling like "they know more".
Obviously actual psychotronics have to do nothing with the above, but it really complicated finding relevant information, and it's pretty frustrating.
As for the second question, in my understanding (which I do not claim to be some authority on the topic), yes. But because it was all developed in a state where anything non-materialist was of suspicion, it is not some sort of inherent spirit or soul (or even if I understand it correctly supernatural ability), the Marxist-Leninst (or at least in theory what was supposed to be Marxism-Leninism) worldview does not allow for such things, the "mental energy" was more or less believed to be a sort of physical, measurable electromagnetic force, and in terms of harnessing that power, Robert Pavlita (whole can of worms on its own), claimed he made devices that could store this physical energy and utilize it. There is a CIA document about this (https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00792R000600350002-2.pdf), that i really recommend reading.
I am also interested in gathering more materials about it, but as I said unfortunately it is hard as psychotronics became a buzzword. As for it being talked about (beyond the modern new-age extent which appropriated the label) or any cold war program existing, that is unlikely, during the transition from socialism to capitalism in central/eastern Europe of late 80s and 90s, a lot of things were destroyed or """Lost""", such topics are also somewhat taboo because of the rampant anti-communist sentiment here (it was basically forced down on us as a deep cultural value at this point), and core ideas behind psychotronics were formed by the ideology and mentality of the time, but that's another topic.
Happy to answer everything!
Yes absolutely, from my experience psychotronics are mostly full of two types of bullshit:
- Mentally ill people clinging to it because of like targeted electronics weapons or whatever bullshit, you know the drill (pretty sad)
- Weird tinfoil hat, alternative medicine kinds, often just a general new-age style mixture of astrology, pseudo "eastern esoterics" and using random language from quantum physics for no apparent reason
There is very little people who treat it seriously, or even treat it as what it actually is.
For example the polish psychotronic society's website is full of GenAI bullshit and just very low quality materials: https://psychotronicy.org
Another site akin being: https://psychotronika.pl/
I don't think you even need to understand the language to see it's pure and utter new-age bullshit. It is mostly used to scam people off from feeling like "they know more".
Obviously actual psychotronics have to do nothing with the above, but it really complicated finding relevant information, and it's pretty frustrating.
As for the second question, in my understanding (which I do not claim to be some authority on the topic), yes. But because it was all developed in a state where anything non-materialist was of suspicion, it is not some sort of inherent spirit or soul (or even if I understand it correctly supernatural ability), the Marxist-Leninst (or at least in theory what was supposed to be Marxism-Leninism) worldview does not allow for such things, the "mental energy" was more or less believed to be a sort of physical, measurable electromagnetic force, and in terms of harnessing that power, Robert Pavlita (whole can of worms on its own), claimed he made devices that could store this physical energy and utilize it. There is a CIA document about this (https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00792R000600350002-2.pdf), that i really recommend reading.
I am also interested in gathering more materials about it, but as I said unfortunately it is hard as psychotronics became a buzzword. As for it being talked about (beyond the modern new-age extent which appropriated the label) or any cold war program existing, that is unlikely, during the transition from socialism to capitalism in central/eastern Europe of late 80s and 90s, a lot of things were destroyed or """Lost""", such topics are also somewhat taboo because of the rampant anti-communist sentiment here (it was basically forced down on us as a deep cultural value at this point), and core ideas behind psychotronics were formed by the ideology and mentality of the time, but that's another topic.
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@dalem the situation is very similar here in the west. there are various 20th century fringes like "psionics"/"radionics", Wilhelm Reich's theories, synchronicity (Jung) or seriality (Kammerer), remote viewing, astral projection, various things that are distinct from the traditional magick and occultism stuff because they aren't connected to any particular religious view and attempt to get at some fundamental laws behind the fact that basically every civilization in human history has had magickal practices and reported experiences with "supernatural" entities.
but the problem is exactly the same as you said, there's a lot of new age garbage that is at best superficially engaged with this stuff to scam people who are varying degrees of mentally ill I guess. there's a part of me that wonders whether things being similar in eastern Europe (or Poland at least) is a direct consequence of the collapse of the USSR and forcibly shoving capitalist/western values down everyone's throats since that kind of inherently is going to lead to a situation like this where something that lacks institutional support or legitimacy ends up being exploited by like, a very specific form of predatory lumpen individual I guess.
anyway yeah I dislike calling this hypothetical electromagnetic phenomenon the "life force" because that itself is a term that has been heavily appropriated by new age con artists and is itself complicated because like I said there's a long tradition in the east of attempting to describe what this "life force" is and how it works. I happen to be of the sort of weird perspective that I believe in a lot of things that conflict with a traditionally materialist view but I also have been influenced a lot by the ufologist Jacques Vallée because he essentially laid out the framework for how to approach parascience in a modern and scientifically (as best we can at least at this stage) rigorous way to understand how these things work. because if they're real then there must be a logic to them and the task is to pin down what that is.
I'll check out that CIA dossier, I've been aware of it for awhile but never read it in detail. also, speaking of Robert Pavlita, I just found this article written by someone who claimed to have met Pavlita in person and seen the psychotronic generator demonstrated: https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_psychotronicweapons05.htm
I also think it's interesting that it mentions that Pavlita was specifically influences by alchemy because there's an extremely rich (overwhelming in fact) history of alchemical texts that one could investigate to try to reverse engineer whatever he was doing. the article also mentions Pavlita's theory that the human body has at least 68 energy centers, which is interesting the Chinese theory of the energy body (which I know a decent amount about from being into Daoism) that is used in TCM and acupuncture has a similar thing about how the body has various meridians. it's also a very extensive and old system that has received some amount of validation in western medical science but a lot of it is also considered to be new age pseudoscience (which IMO is at least partly because western science is arbitrarily dogmatic and controlled by the interests of the military-industrial complex and pharmaceutical industries).
>during the transition from socialism to capitalism in central/eastern Europe of late 80s and 90s, a lot of things were destroyed or """Lost"""
I can't remember off the top of my head what this was and would have to dig it up again but when I last looked into this I remember there being at least some texts from the Czech psychotronics researchers that were out there, out of print and only available in Czech but seemingly not impossible to acquire.
but the problem is exactly the same as you said, there's a lot of new age garbage that is at best superficially engaged with this stuff to scam people who are varying degrees of mentally ill I guess. there's a part of me that wonders whether things being similar in eastern Europe (or Poland at least) is a direct consequence of the collapse of the USSR and forcibly shoving capitalist/western values down everyone's throats since that kind of inherently is going to lead to a situation like this where something that lacks institutional support or legitimacy ends up being exploited by like, a very specific form of predatory lumpen individual I guess.
anyway yeah I dislike calling this hypothetical electromagnetic phenomenon the "life force" because that itself is a term that has been heavily appropriated by new age con artists and is itself complicated because like I said there's a long tradition in the east of attempting to describe what this "life force" is and how it works. I happen to be of the sort of weird perspective that I believe in a lot of things that conflict with a traditionally materialist view but I also have been influenced a lot by the ufologist Jacques Vallée because he essentially laid out the framework for how to approach parascience in a modern and scientifically (as best we can at least at this stage) rigorous way to understand how these things work. because if they're real then there must be a logic to them and the task is to pin down what that is.
I'll check out that CIA dossier, I've been aware of it for awhile but never read it in detail. also, speaking of Robert Pavlita, I just found this article written by someone who claimed to have met Pavlita in person and seen the psychotronic generator demonstrated: https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_psychotronicweapons05.htm
I also think it's interesting that it mentions that Pavlita was specifically influences by alchemy because there's an extremely rich (overwhelming in fact) history of alchemical texts that one could investigate to try to reverse engineer whatever he was doing. the article also mentions Pavlita's theory that the human body has at least 68 energy centers, which is interesting the Chinese theory of the energy body (which I know a decent amount about from being into Daoism) that is used in TCM and acupuncture has a similar thing about how the body has various meridians. it's also a very extensive and old system that has received some amount of validation in western medical science but a lot of it is also considered to be new age pseudoscience (which IMO is at least partly because western science is arbitrarily dogmatic and controlled by the interests of the military-industrial complex and pharmaceutical industries).
>during the transition from socialism to capitalism in central/eastern Europe of late 80s and 90s, a lot of things were destroyed or """Lost"""
I can't remember off the top of my head what this was and would have to dig it up again but when I last looked into this I remember there being at least some texts from the Czech psychotronics researchers that were out there, out of print and only available in Czech but seemingly not impossible to acquire.
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@nyx
> there's a part of me that wonders whether things being similar in eastern Europe (or Poland at least) is a direct consequence of the collapse of the USSR and forcibly shoving capitalist/western values
Absolutely, we are by all means a obedient slave of the western hegemony and all of its apparatus (to a point where when I turn on the news on TV I sometimes wonder if I am not actually living in the US), even daring to question it is a social and political suicide, and all anti-nato/us/eu views are unfortunately only held by the far-right nationalist lunatics, cultural values have shifted a lot, liberalism has eaten thru all that was left a long time ago, the transition of the economic system obviously brought with it western ways of tinfoil hat new-age beliefs, somewhat because of the forbidden-fruit effect (previously such practices were pretty regulated, when it all came down it was a wild-west of cults, weird schemes and shallow spiritualism of all kind), and I guess these people just hopped onto the closest label known before (psychotronics), but that's just my guess.
>I believe in a lot of things that conflict with a traditionally materialist view but I also have been influenced a lot by the ufologist Jacques Vallée
I find this extremely interesting, despite my various interests in these fields (and actual on-hands dabbling into it) I am mostly a skeptic when it comes to spiritual stuff and parasciences, somewhat because of bad experiences, obviously with no judgement or anything. But I am really curious how does one synthesize the two, I have quite a few marxist friends who are religious and it always fascinated me, I always get a different answer, so I am curious on your viewpoint here ;)
>, I just found this article written by someone who claimed to have met Pavlita in person and seen the psychotronic generator demonstrated
I saw this! In fact I have it in my bookmarks for an embarrassing amount of time now... guess now it's the time to read it.
>I can't remember off the top of my head what this was and would have to dig it up again but when I last looked into this I remember there being at least some texts from the Czech psychotronics researchers that were out there, out of print and only available in Czech but seemingly not impossible to acquire.
Obviously there is some stuff that could be found, but I don't think it's totally crazy to believe that it was in the interests of these falling states to get rid of some of this stuff (looking at how much noise and panic the reveal of MKUltra caused)
> there's a part of me that wonders whether things being similar in eastern Europe (or Poland at least) is a direct consequence of the collapse of the USSR and forcibly shoving capitalist/western values
Absolutely, we are by all means a obedient slave of the western hegemony and all of its apparatus (to a point where when I turn on the news on TV I sometimes wonder if I am not actually living in the US), even daring to question it is a social and political suicide, and all anti-nato/us/eu views are unfortunately only held by the far-right nationalist lunatics, cultural values have shifted a lot, liberalism has eaten thru all that was left a long time ago, the transition of the economic system obviously brought with it western ways of tinfoil hat new-age beliefs, somewhat because of the forbidden-fruit effect (previously such practices were pretty regulated, when it all came down it was a wild-west of cults, weird schemes and shallow spiritualism of all kind), and I guess these people just hopped onto the closest label known before (psychotronics), but that's just my guess.
>I believe in a lot of things that conflict with a traditionally materialist view but I also have been influenced a lot by the ufologist Jacques Vallée
I find this extremely interesting, despite my various interests in these fields (and actual on-hands dabbling into it) I am mostly a skeptic when it comes to spiritual stuff and parasciences, somewhat because of bad experiences, obviously with no judgement or anything. But I am really curious how does one synthesize the two, I have quite a few marxist friends who are religious and it always fascinated me, I always get a different answer, so I am curious on your viewpoint here ;)
>, I just found this article written by someone who claimed to have met Pavlita in person and seen the psychotronic generator demonstrated
I saw this! In fact I have it in my bookmarks for an embarrassing amount of time now... guess now it's the time to read it.
>I can't remember off the top of my head what this was and would have to dig it up again but when I last looked into this I remember there being at least some texts from the Czech psychotronics researchers that were out there, out of print and only available in Czech but seemingly not impossible to acquire.
Obviously there is some stuff that could be found, but I don't think it's totally crazy to believe that it was in the interests of these falling states to get rid of some of this stuff (looking at how much noise and panic the reveal of MKUltra caused)
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@dalem alright yeah I knew my intuitions were correct about that. it's a secondary effect I've noticed of the willful destruction of information (a similar phenomenon was seen with the rise of Christianity and the burning of the Library of Alexandria) where the void that is left over from the sudden destruction of information in events like the burning of the Library or the collapse of the Soviet Union doesn't result in the memory of it simply going away. it's the same as when anything dies: a 'ghost', if you will, of it continues to persist afterwards and manifests itself in how it influences the systems that come afterwards. but in this case the effects of something violent, tragic, and catastrophic like the destruction of a civilization's knowledge results in a 'haunting' that has a decidedly malevolent quality to it.
in fact this basically gets at how I would answer the question of how to square my "paranormal" beliefs (I don't even like to use the word 'belief' because it implies superstition) with being a communist. I think a major problem with a lot of communist theory is that it's in a similar position that all of western civilization is currently stuck in, where the classical Newtonian view of the world as being solely materialist and mechanical is actually only part of the picture; the natural sciences like a century ago discovered that the universe is much more probabilistic in nature than we have previously thought, and the rest of the world has not caught up with this yet because it pretty much upends the entire cultural and philosophical foundations of western civ, which have long been obsessed with what is rational, linear, and able to be controlled in such a manner for empire-building purposes.
as far as Vallée goes, I think he's one of the most useful researchers in this broad assemblage of different topics that gets called "paranormal" or whatever because his whole methodology is essentially to look at historical data and folklore and cross-examine them to find what about those reported experiences have common narratives that recur independently of each other over and over again. his whole position boils down to basically that whatever these things are, it would be far more absurd, improbable, and unscientific to simply denounce all these things as not being real, that people across hundreds of years of history and cultures all across the globe are all merely lying or experiencing forms of temporary psychosis in the absence of any history of mental illness that all follow the same blueprints. if you wanna get more philosophical: if the capacity is within all of us to have experiences that follow the same fundamental script, is that not then a layer of 'reality'?
so yeah I basically think that there's surely something to this but that it's a frontier in science that there is a massive amount of cultural and institutional resistance to because of how dangerous it is to our civilization's fundamental beliefs if not also dangerous for the ability of the ruling classes to control people (assuming that psychotronic weapons are a real thing you can make).
>looking at how much noise and panic the reveal of MKUltra caused
indeed there's a lot of information out there on these clandestine operations but a lot that is also strategically withheld or otherwise what gets released is then mixed in with disinfo.
in fact this basically gets at how I would answer the question of how to square my "paranormal" beliefs (I don't even like to use the word 'belief' because it implies superstition) with being a communist. I think a major problem with a lot of communist theory is that it's in a similar position that all of western civilization is currently stuck in, where the classical Newtonian view of the world as being solely materialist and mechanical is actually only part of the picture; the natural sciences like a century ago discovered that the universe is much more probabilistic in nature than we have previously thought, and the rest of the world has not caught up with this yet because it pretty much upends the entire cultural and philosophical foundations of western civ, which have long been obsessed with what is rational, linear, and able to be controlled in such a manner for empire-building purposes.
as far as Vallée goes, I think he's one of the most useful researchers in this broad assemblage of different topics that gets called "paranormal" or whatever because his whole methodology is essentially to look at historical data and folklore and cross-examine them to find what about those reported experiences have common narratives that recur independently of each other over and over again. his whole position boils down to basically that whatever these things are, it would be far more absurd, improbable, and unscientific to simply denounce all these things as not being real, that people across hundreds of years of history and cultures all across the globe are all merely lying or experiencing forms of temporary psychosis in the absence of any history of mental illness that all follow the same blueprints. if you wanna get more philosophical: if the capacity is within all of us to have experiences that follow the same fundamental script, is that not then a layer of 'reality'?
so yeah I basically think that there's surely something to this but that it's a frontier in science that there is a massive amount of cultural and institutional resistance to because of how dangerous it is to our civilization's fundamental beliefs if not also dangerous for the ability of the ruling classes to control people (assuming that psychotronic weapons are a real thing you can make).
>looking at how much noise and panic the reveal of MKUltra caused
indeed there's a lot of information out there on these clandestine operations but a lot that is also strategically withheld or otherwise what gets released is then mixed in with disinfo.
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