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Gizmo starts out straight, then life takes some surprising turns.
Gizmo Carson, an engineer and Korean War vet with Top Secret security clearance, got his nickname because he can fix almost anything. Throughout the 1950s, Gizmo is as straight-arrow as they come. However, public outcry against the Vietnam War in the Sixties causes him to quit the military-industrial complex and embrace the hippie counterculture.
At a commune, he’s introduced to orgone—life force energy discovered by psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich. He’s horrified when he hears that the government he’d proudly served violated the First Amendment and burned the scientist’s books! Gizmo decides to right that wrong after he receives a rare schematic for Reich’s orgone energy accumulator that the censors missed.
He drops out and spends the ‘70s traveling in a VW camper, building the devices. People start calling him Orgone Gizmo. He’s flattered. When Indian gurus bring yoga to America, he sees the similarity between orgone and what the gurus call prana.
Years later, Gizmo encounters an improbable character who survives without eating, sustained solely by orgone energy. The stranger says radioactive fallout in the atmosphere has created a deadly form of orgone, and he desperately needs Gizmo to build him an accumulator. Easy enough, but the place his new friend wants to be taken is a dangerous and highly classified area.
Orgone is the fundamental creative life energy that charges and radiates from all living beings. It also streams freely through the atmosphere and outer space.
The first Western doctor to identify it was Wilhelm Reich, a colleague of Sigmund Freud. Reich observed a bioenergy while studying microscopic protozoa. At first, he thought it was a specific form of electricity, but noticed that it did not always obey known laws of energy. He found larger, more complex organisms, even humans, emitted the same energy. Reich believed it was more likely a special energy common to all life. He called it orgone.
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