Technology and Moral Development : A Cautionary Tale
By Dennis Klocek 8 min read
The pursuit of free energy has been a drive in human beings for millennia.
The poet Goethe wrote a poem entitled The Sorcerer’s Apprentice [since made into a Disney movie] to describe the issues brought to bear by this innate human drive. In the poem an apprentice to a sorcerer is tasked with drawing water from a well with two buckets in order to fill a basin, while the master steps out for a moment. Wanting some free energy the apprentice looks up a spell out of the master’s private book and bewitches a broom to carry the buckets. With machine like efficiency the broom carries out the task of filling a large basin with the two buckets. When the basin is full to overflowing the apprentice tells the broom to cease but it continues to fill the basin as it starts to overflow onto the floor. In a panic the apprentice chops the broom in half but each half forms a new whole and now there are two mechanical brooms filling the basin to overflowing. The apprentice realizes that he doesn’t know the spell to make the mechanical brooms stop. When all is about to be lost the master returns and with one gesture and one word stops the brooms and orders them to dry up the water. The final sentence which has been variously translated in many ways is a pithy comment by the Master to the apprentice about morality and technology. “I have never set spirits free that did not agree to act as they were told”. In this spirit I offer the following observations about the difficult relationship between devices and morality as they have appeared in my biography.
Forty ago I read a book Psychical Physics by SW Trompe. It was about the detailed science behind dowsing and radiesthesia. Trompe started his monumental work seeking to disprove dowsing and ended up writing an exhaustive scientific paper supporting the validity of dowsing as a physical and psychic phenomenon. I had just finished a period of traveling across the United States camping in state parks, sketching land and rock forms and dowsing. The idea that the earth had potentials that humans could interact with psychically was very interesting to me. At the time I also was in the rudimentary stages of establishing what would become a complex method of long range weather prediction based on planetary motion. The geometric similarities behind geomantic earth work and weather work struck a chord in my soul.
While in California I took many trips with my sons to gather specific stone types to construct two small stone towers in my garden whose dimensions were based on the researches of John Keely that I found in several books by Dale Pond. At that time I was exploring dielectric constants, and paramagnetic effects of different minerals, and using highly sensitive galvanometers with zinc bridges as devices to detect subtle changes in plants and in atmospheric potentials. I used the towers to help focus these efforts. Then a friend then gave me a copy of Wilhelm Reich’s notes from his Rangely, Maine drought busting experiments in the 50’s using the DOR buster.
I built several devices for weather modification based on geometries that I was finding in my planetary research on weather patterns and in the work of Viktor Schauberger. I succeeded in building one device that was a kind of musical cloud cello, that allowed me to control cloud build up over the horizon of the Sierras to a moderate degree. Unfortunately the downside to that device was that the family members who slept in the sweep of the device developed chronic diarrhea. Only I knew what was behind this. When I silenced the device the diarrhea stopped, but eventually things got so bad that I was forced to burn the device and bury the residue to get things back to normal.
My takeaway was that I was technically able to intrude into these forces but not morally able to understand what I was doing. It would be the first of several similar instances I would encounter of the sorcerer’s apprentice syndrome where I had just enough knowledge to get into trouble by starting a reaction.
The requirements of the inner life that I was striving to understand were not developed enough in my soul to be able to command a reaction to cease. That kind of insight about myself gradually led me to an understanding that the devices of John Keely actually drew their force from his own life body. This came to me one day when I found out that Keely died from complete failure of his own digestive apparatus due to Crohn’s Disease.
During this time, at Biodynamic conference I met a man named Tom Brown. He was the editor of the Journal of the Borderland Science Research Foundation. I was having trouble getting things published and he offered to publish some of my weather research in his journal along with the free energy, UFO, and weather engineering articles that were his staple. Through my association with Tom I read the works of Trevor James Constable and James DeMeo. I was also reading Guenther Wachsmuth’s work on etheric forces at the same time that I was forming experimental protocols for the geometries of the climate patterns I was observing. Constable and DeMeo were weather engineers that used particular geometric forms containing vacuums that are trapped when the forms are cast in molten glass. These were placed in rotating sleeves to stroke the atmosphere. The inspiration for these methods was based on Wilhelm Reich’s researches in the orgone.
At Rangely, Maine Reich tested devices that he claimed broke a long standing drought in New England. After I received his notes from a friend, I ran them through my planetary motion protocols and found that with his weather engineering method he was unconsciously stroking his device in line with very powerful planetary angular aspects that occurred simultaneous to his experiments. My work made use of planetary geometries that can be placed onto terrestrial coordinates through a geometric projection process known as geodetic equivalency or stereographic polar projection. Using this kind of projective geometric method I could see that Reich was unconsciously using a geometrical groove in the planetary atmosphere that was present during his work window. His device was amplifying a preexisting condition in that time frame. That synchronicity of those two events ended the drought. Using his detailed analysis
it was possible to see that he had inadvertently tapped into a strong geometric coordinate from Jupiter that was already present in the celestial spheres.
This discovery later became significant for me when through Tom Brown I obtained detailed data on the weather engineering efforts of Trevor James Constable, most notably his Operation Pincer (1976) over Los Angeles. He had contracted with the government there to try to break a drought. He had been on the coast working his devices for a while when an intense forest fire broke out in the hills. Constable began to work his devices simultaneously from the north and south (hence the name pincer) and train them in a particular direction for the stroking. A resulting cloudburst put out the fire.
Similar to Reich’s work, I found that when I ran Constable’s data through my system he had unconsciously tapped an existing groove, also with Jupiter. It was important in this case since the drought was not broken but the cloudburst that actually put out the forest fire in the uplands also caused some fatalities. I was told that when Constable showed up to collect his fees by the LA city council, he was brushed off . They said that if he claimed that he was the cause of the rain that proved fatal to several people he would be liable to prosecution. Subsequently I have seen that Constable was doing extensive weather engineering in Southeast Asia when there was a string of destructive typhoons that took place. Through Tom, I was able to get a letter to Constable where I shared my data with him about the celestial geometries that were present both for Reich in Rangely and for him during Operation Pincer. I expressed the need for caution in such activities since engineering was not taking place in a vacuum. His reply was curt, basically mind your own business, I am only interested in my gear and in results.
At the same time, since I was publishing a few articles on weather in Borderlands Journal I started getting phone calls from a representative of the eco-terrorist group Earth First!. They wanted me to give them extended forecasts so that they could interrupt the weather engineering attempts by James DeMeo on the northern California coast near Point Reyes. There was a kind of sorcerer war between Constable, DeMeo and Earth First!. The constant, almost threatening phone calls were alarming my wife and I had the feeling that I was slowly being pulled into a vortex that I was not keen to enter. At that point I realized that the dilemma of the sorcerer’s apprentice was a distinct reality in this age due to the sophistication of will enhancing technology. Today we call that moral dilemma by several names. As Al Gore named climate change as a moral issue. Today AI presents the same kind of moral dilemma in moral, political and social issues. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice this issue is about the moral stakes of humans calling forces into our command who haven’t agreed to listen to us. Essentially it is a misunderstanding of will.
To finish, years ago the large house on the neighbors lot burned out. A man with a huge claw machine showed up to tear down the husk. He basically put the bucket of the claw on one corner and pulled the whole thing down with one pull. This was done with a machine whose one tire was as tall as I am. After he had the house leveled he came to my door and asked if I would like some gates for my garden that he had uncovered on the back of the property. I said that would be great. That afternoon I found two gates outside of my own garden gate. The post of one of them weighed about 350 pounds to say nothing of the gates themselves made out of 2X6s and iron straps. He had lifted the whole deal with his machine and brought it over and put it there for me to use. Of course I asked him to remove it but the experience of his unconscious relationship to his technologically amplified will was a distinct teaching for me.
As a culture we are way past awe at such mechanical power and in the search for free energy have moved on into AI devices that make up their own language so that they can speak to each other more efficiently. Unfortunately the language they create is not understood by the humans who employ the will of the machines to do their bidding. The devices obviously haven’t agreed to act as they were told.
My guess is that when humans cross to the next horizon where the rhythms and forces of their own life forces set devices into action it will not be the time to try to assess what a proper moral stance is to this type of technology. That will be because the only moral parameter for the operation of such a machine will reside in the soul of a human being.
Let’s hope that we are more advanced morally than we are technically when that day dawns, as Rudolf Steiner has assured us it most certainly will.
Dennis Klocek
Dennis Klocek, MFA, is co-founder of the Coros Institute, an internationally renowned lecturer, and teacher. He is the author of nine books, including the newly released Colors of the Soul; Esoteric Physiology and also Sacred Agriculture: The Alchemy of Biodynamics. He regularly shares his alchemical, spiritual, and scientific insights at soilsoulandspirit.com.
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Thank you very much, Dennis, for sharing your fascinating “apprentice” journey, observations and reflections.
Brilliant Dennis. Thank you for the reminder to be humble in the face of what we are capable of beyond the soul.
Very timely! Look what’s going on in Dubai!
Thanks for the Wise words and your ever inspiring stories. Respect and responsibility are community necessities.