THE DR. DROWN BIOGRAPHY, "CRIMINAL OR GENIUS?"
And Why It Has Not Been Published
by Trevor James
The status of my biography of the late Dr. Ruth Drown is evidently of considerable interest to many Associates, including Margaret L. McKinnon of Turlock. Her letter in the July 1966 Journal, the radiesthesia inquiry of Robert and Grace Reynolds in the same issue and the Rev. Jamison's comments exemplify the interest that is centered on this general field. I also get many mailed inquiries about the Drown biography, which my absence in the U.S. Merchant Marine during the present emergency makes it hard for me to answer. Accordingly the following comments should serve to bring many friends and Associates up to date on the book project and perhaps start new inquiry into radiesthesia by interested persons.
The Drown biography, "Criminal or Genius?" was completed to her satisfaction in 1961. Offered in the regular literary marketplace, the volume quickly ran afoul of the long arm of Big Medicine. All major publishers in New York retain one or more medical doctors as literary consultants on properties having a medical aspect. The editors are rarely empowered to proceed with publication of medically oriented books Without the "opinion" of such consultants.
The writer on radionics, radiesthesia and kindred subjects may thus be assured that the monolithic objectives of America's medical politicians are well served in publishing. The experiences which my literary agent and myself had with book publishers and "Criminal or Genius?" uniformly followed the medical censorship pattern. . . all "unofficial" but quite definite. The only possibility of publishing "Criminal or Genius?" without editorial or medical conditioning of its content is to publish it privately.
The problems of publishing the biography were soon overtaken by the final, classically tragic events of Dr. Brown's life. Her arrest, subsequent illness, death and the complicated litigation surrounding these events have kept the book out of publication, even privately, for a number of reasons too involved to detail here.
Meanwhile, my understanding of this field has progressed considerably, as a result of much study and experiment. My view is that the book should now be rewritten to include much additional illuminating information developed directly from Dr. Brown's indications. What the ultimate version of "Criminal or Genius?" will be, or even if it will ever be published is something I cannot say at present. It may be appropriate to run some significant excerpts from "Criminal or Genius?" in future issues of the Journal.
Margaret McKinnon's ethical objections to radionic attacks on her foes parallel those of Dr. Drown, and on this point I differed sharply with the late genius and pioneer. In Dr. Brown's case one was in the presence of a classical tragedy and they were events not intended to be aborted, even though her adamant refusal to use her instruments with harm to anyone was not based on any sense of destiny, but upon the inflexible high-mindedness that governed her life.
ARMAGEDDON IN AMERICA
American life is falling increasingly into the grip of Life-Negative forces. Many of the personalities occupying the seats of power, both minor and major, are to the occult scientist clearly non-human. There can be no doubt that the world and especially America (the battleground) is being systematically and even feverishly prepared for the Ahrimanic incarnation (Ahriman, the embodiment of evil or the devil in Persia at the time of Zoroaster. RHC) We are entering a critical period of human evolution where we must be willing to defend ourselves if we are to discharge our obligations as fighters for Truth and Light.
The occultist, who is also a supreme realist, makes no bones about self-defense. He does not undertake his own higher development for the purpose of being wiped out by the first malefic entity he encounters. He MASTERS these things as the price of his survival and development, so that he ultimately becomes a MASTER. When lethal energies are sent against him, and he is protected through his own rituals, it is not his concern that the lethal forces rebound to their source and consume the personality whose malevolence released them in the first place.
The situation we face today is that the whole apparatus of civil power is being used to extinguish the efforts being made in behalf of radionics, radiesthesia, Drown therapy and kindred arts. The black hearted men who have corrupted the American concept of government and liberty have made it a fact of modern life that scientific truth is determined in the courts -- by lawyers, judges and panels of ignorant and often bribed lay jurors. The question is whether or not those who went to see "fine force" medicine prevail are willing to develop its defensive aspects.
No help whatever can be expected from the orthodox, official, mechanistically-minded scientific community. On the contrary, battalions of so-called “experts” from all scientific disciplines will trample each other into the tarmac in their enthusiastic efforts to get to the nearest Brown or Reich trial and use their fake, self-appointed authority to sink the humanitarians. These carrion men not only push the Avatars off the Earth but also set their work back decades in the process. My view is that ways must be found by which courtroom demonstrations of a lethal character can be developed, so that these pestilential district attorneys and fake "expert" witnesses can be brought face to face with the life-negative forces whose votaries they are.
THE BEST DEFENSE IS OFFENSE
This is a period when fighting for the Truth means that a far more direct combat will be joined on the physical plane. The Ahrimanic powers are entering incarnation in force, and in cooperation with their unseen cohorts, are preparing humanity for the most stupendous event since Golgotha. If Armageddon be at hand, who among Borderlanders really believes that the Forces of Light fulfill their destiny simply by lining up like ten pins to be bowled over by the opposition? Who can honestly advocate that the human destiny he supinely surrendered to the powers that stand below Man? Not all the agonizing reappraisals of our time are to be made by diplomats and politicians!
Those who are drawn to radionics, radiesthesia and kindred arts are expressing a soul-hunger for the re-establishment of conscious connections between microcosm and macrocosm, long ago lost by Mechanistic science and unregainable by mechanistic methods. The innocuous appearing Drown "rates" are the master mathematical key to the functioning of the great Rays in the life of the Earths including their functioning in matter. Such revelations are the Spearhead of the New Age, and will suffer the full fury of Ahrimanic assault until such time as the strength of human convictions makes them the foundation of a new Life-Positive science. As the basis of scientific inquiry alters so will the scientific nature of the Drown instruments be correctly understood.
On the question of the scientific vs. psychic aspects of the Drown work, which are raised again in our Director's reply to Bob and Grace Reynolds, let me reiterate that the Drown work is not "psychic" in the sense usually implied by that word in Borderland circles. Drown therapy has nothing to do with dim, happenstance, quasi-mediumistic perceptions of any asserted or would-be seer. From the point of View of mechanistic official science the Drown instruments are "psychic" in the sense of being beyond known physical processes. At this point, the mode and nature of human cognition enter the picture with decisive importance. Discussion of the matter becomes impossible without a few extra conceptual stepping stones.
One of my main beefs with and major criticisms of Borderland experimenters in general is their desire to have their work "accepted" by official science. Nothing in this world is more irrational than this business of running to medical doctors, mechanistic chemists and the physicists of the dead-and-decomposed when your efforts are being expended in the realm of the Living! The people whose approval, endorsement and acceptance you are seeking are qualified and trained in all the things that your work is not. Their intuitive capacities have been systematically expunged or suppressed by the dead educational methods of which they are the products. Their world outlook, if indeed it can be graced by the term, is split into mechanistic, materialist sciences on the one hand, and mysticism on the other. They automatically deem you a mystic.
If the vital stirrings of functional, life-positive thinking [12] were not active in a Borderlander, he would not be a Borderlander in the first place. He would be laboring the dead vineyards of official science with the rest of the world's life-negative scientific workers, his labors destined inevitably to land him and the rest of the human race in explosive substance. Running to the men of the past for approval of the sciences of the future -- now in their infancy -- is the action of irrational people.
BEWARE "AUTHORITY"
Neither the evolving human mind nor the methodology of science are static. Both burn onward from year to year. Thus, the so-called scientific worker who says "Man is thus and so, and knows only thus and so, therefore the Drown work is not scientific" is a drag on human progress. Tomorrow man adds new capacities or wins new insight, then he knows something else. Beware the highly-qualified Authority who wants to anchor you in static confines of his comfortable conceptions. Only a damned fool seeks the approval of such people.
Nevertheless even enlightened peeple in our time, including some of our Borderlanders, grub and scrape for such approval. Borderland work of significance is and must be independent in the literal sense of the word. The findings and discoveries of such independent work will always find their way to those ready to study, accept and use such work, whether in or out of the professional world. A classic case is that of Wilhelm Reich, M.D., who as a brilliant psychoanalyst clearly saw the need to make his discoveries in primary energy into an independent new scientific discipline, which he called Orgonomy. He published everything as he went along, and it waits today for all with the will and guidance to seek it out. Reich knew the savagery of the irrational human being as few men have ever known it, and that savagery manifests as an urge to throttle and suppress everything to do with living functioning.
The life-negative world never ceases trying to eradicate those who advance the cause of living functioning. Where they cannot ridicule, professionally eliminate, murder or suppress, they try and confuse and disrupt. Or what is worse, subvert discoveries in living functioning by trying to drag them into a false relationship with the world of Authority. It was just such a situation that Ruth Drown confronted in the early nineteen thirties.
She was compelled to maintain an independence which many people found impenetrable, because she quickly discerned that her field of of work exerted an inordinate attraction for the mechanistic electronic-minded dabbler. Without any substantial knowledge of either the human body or the functional principles on which the physical Drown instruments were and are based, these misguided individuals began the widespread distortion and corruption of an otherwise pure stream of thought. The confusion surrounding the theory and practice of radionics today stems from this period, as does the multiplicity of instrument designs and conceptions that bedevil and bemuse the newcomer. (To be concluded in the next Journal.)