Astral Entities: When Science Chooses Comfort Over Truth

From Galileo’s Trials to Reich’s Bions: Will Science Ignore the Unseen Again?

“Science progresses one funeral at a time.” – Max Planck

What happens when an observation is too uncomfortable for a reigning scientific paradigm? When the evidence hints at forces we cannot quantify, processes we cannot explain, and possibilities that threaten the intellectual foundations of an entire discipline? History provides the answer: science looks away. It ridicules, it ignores, it locks the door and throws away the key, until someone else, decades or centuries later, breaks it open.

This is the story of Wilhelm Reich’s bion research. But it’s also the story of Galileo, of Giordano Bruno, and of every anomaly that dared to exist before the theory that could accommodate it. And it’s a story that repeats even today, quietly, persistently, wherever the unknown pushes against the ego of science.

Reich and the Forbidden Experiment

In the 1930s, Wilhelm Reich performed a series of experiments that should, by all accounts, have shaken biology to its core. He reported that sterilized inorganic matter, when boiled and then placed in nutrient solution, organized into vesicular structures he called bions. These structures pulsated, merged, and in some cases appeared to move with life-like energy. Reich interpreted them as transitional forms between non-life and life, animated by a universal life force he called orgone energy.

By today’s standards, the description is startlingly close to what modern science calls protocells, primitive, membrane-bound vesicles that exhibit some properties of living systems. The difference? Modern protocell research begins with amphiphiles and carefully designed chemical substrates. Reich claimed to start with inert, sterilized matter, sand, coal, soil, and still observed organized vesicular systems. No DNA. No enzymes. Just organization emerging from chaos.

An extraordinary claim? Absolutely. And extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But instead of testing, mainstream science chose something easier: silence. But why was the door shut by science? The reasons were not empirical; they were sociological and psychological.

The Wilheim Reich Taboo: Reich later ventured into cloud-busting and cosmic energy. He spoke the language of life energy, words that trigger the deepest allergic reaction in mechanistic science. After his legal persecution and imprisonment in the U.S., his name became a synonym for pseudoscience. From that moment, any scientist daring to replicate his work risked professional suicide.

Paradigm Lock-In: Accepting Reich’s findings would have shattered two sacred dogmas. First, all life comes from pre-existing life (Cell Theory), and second, the molecular mechanism explains everything. If bions were real, life could self-organize under conditions not predicted by standard chemistry and perhaps involve forces outside the chemical paradigm. For a discipline that expelled “vitalism” at gunpoint, this was unthinkable.

The Ego of Science: Here comes the uncomfortable truth. Science markets itself as humble, but in practice, it hates admitting ignorance. When a phenomenon resists explanation, be it bions in 1938 or the problem of consciousness today, the typical response is not honest curiosity but strategic neglect. The unknown is embarrassing. Better to deny the anomaly than to face a theoretical vacuum.

Thomas Kuhn, in his classic book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, diagnosed this centuries-old pathology. Normal science, he wrote, does not embrace anomalies; it suppresses them until a new paradigm makes sense of them. That is not rationality; it is institutional self-preservation.

Another More Recent Example: The Heartbeat Mystery

Think this is just ancient history? Consider human embryology. At around the 21^st day after conception, out of nowhere, a distinctive fetal pulse of 110 beats per minute begins in utero. Here’s the shocker: this pulse is located in the exact spot where, a few weeks later, the first heart muscle fibers begin to form. As if a heartbeat without a heart is not sufficiently astounding, the precise trigger for that first pulse remains unknown. Biophysics can model the ionic flows, the conduction system, the mechanical loops, but what initiates the very first contraction? There is no satisfying answer. Some researchers gesture toward “emergent self-organization.” Others speculate about quantum coherence in living systems, but that language, like “orgone,” carries stigma.

So, what does science do? It shrugs. It catalogs everything up to the brink of mystery, then looks away. Admitting that the heartbeat might involve forces or principles outside classical electrochemistry, perhaps something akin to a quantum organizing field, is too hard a blow to the ego of a discipline that claims near-omniscience.

Psychedelic Science and the Return of “Astral Parasites”

For centuries, cultures have spoken of spirits, demons, and parasitic entities that influence human thought and behavior. Anthropology treated them as myth; psychology reinterpreted them as unconscious archetypes (Jung’s Shadow) or primitive drives (Freud’s Id). Internal Family Systems theory softened them into “unattached burdens.” The metaphysical language was domesticated, rendered safe for the laboratory.

And then came the psychedelic renaissance.

At Johns Hopkins and other research centers, clinical trials with psilocybin and DMT have produced a surprising report: a significant fraction of subjects encounter entities, sometimes benevolent guides, sometimes hostile beings, sometimes parasitic or demonic presences, during deep psychedelic states. These experiences are not isolated; they occur with statistical regularity and with patterns that suggest an ontological puzzle, not mere hallucination.

When volunteers describe meeting parasites that latch onto their energy, or beings that seem autonomous and intelligent, the transcripts read like something from ancient shamanism, or a modern exorcism. And yet these reports emerge under double-blind conditions, in controlled clinical environments, with educated, often skeptical participants.

These entities do not only appear in clinical psychedelic research. Within traditional ayahuasca communities, it is well documented that participants occasionally enter a state of extreme psychological intensity, exhibiting out-of-control movements, vocalizations, and sometimes requiring physical restraint to ensure the safety of themselves and others. In my book Ayahuasca Wisdom: Achieving Personal Spiritual Healing with a Quantum Model of the Psyche, I coined the term “Visionary Intense Release Syndrome” (VIRS) to describe this rare, unnamed phenomenon. During a VIRS episode, participants often display behaviors and somatic responses that can only be interpreted as temporary possession by entities, particularly because once they recover, they rarely retain conscious memory of the events. Such observations suggest that these anomalous encounters are not metaphorical or hallucinatory alone; they exhibit an autonomous quality that challenges the materialist assumptions of contemporary psychology.

What is striking is how mainstream science responds, or fails to respond, to these phenomena. So here we are again: an anomaly at the edge of the paradigm. The bion in psychology. The embryonic heartbeat of the psyche. Will science once again look away? Will it classify these encounters as “subjective neural fireworks,” or will it consider, cautiously, rigorously, that consciousness may access layers of reality uncharted by materialism?

The Pattern and the Final Question

Bions. The first heartbeat. Entity encounters. Three anomalies in three domains, bound by a common thread: forces that science cannot yet explain, and therefore prefers to deny.

But denial is not knowledge. And if Kuhn was right, anomalies are the seeds of the next paradigm. The question is not whether they exist; they do, but whether science will face them with humility or repeat its ancient habit of protecting theory over truth.

So, as the psychedelic renaissance unfolds, here is the final question:

Reich may have been wrong about many things. But something appears to live within his replicable framework of bions, the vesicles in sterile broth, something prematurely buried. The early heartbeat, same thing, it’s time to revise science’s materialistic dogmas. Then, the entities in psychedelic states might not be pseudoscience. They could be tomorrow’s revolution, arriving too soon to be recognized.

Will science meet these reports with honest curiosity, or will it, once again, choose the comfort of ignorance over the discomfort of truth?