THE SECRET OF LIGHT

Last year, I reviewed a book about Walter Russell (1871-1963) called The Man who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe by Glenn Clark. This is a portrait of an extraordinary man and his multifarious talents as a scientist, philosopher, visual artist, sculptor, architect, skater and horseman who famously said that genius is self-bestowed and mediocrity is self-inflicted. The main source of his insights originated in a three-week mystical experience in the early 1920s in which he experienced identity with the Universal Mind and hence with its knowledge. This remarkable book repays close study and in some ways builds on the understanding of Goethe about the dynamics of natural processes applying at all levels of life. It contains many diagrams that help readers to grasp some unfamiliar concepts. Here I can only outline a few of the most important ones.

Life is Spirit and Spirit is still at the centre of things. The body does not originate life, but manifests it. God is Light, Universal Mind. Mind is Light and Mind knows. There is One Mind, One Self, One Life, One Soul. It is God who is conscious, who thinks and imagines through us. The Mind Universe is one of Knowing, and human beings live in the two worlds of knowing and sensing in the rhythmic wave universe of polarities. The positive is represented by the balanced stillness, stability and unity of the Divine, while the negative is unbalanced motion in terms of instability, multiplicity, separateness and a sensation. The rhythm of life is to unfold from the One, the unmanifest, the invisible into the Many, the manifest, the visible and then to re-fold back into the One. This is birth, awakening, emergence, creation, individualisation followed by a return in terms of sleep, decay, disintegration and death. The Creating Universe grows out of the One in a radial fashion, ultimately disappearing back into the One.

Cosmic Consciousness is seen as the goal of human development, whereby we as individuals become aware of our oneness with the Universal Mind and can manifest genius. These individuals know the Light of God in themselves. In the divine stillness, we can know the causes of things, while their effects can be comprehended in the visible world. The brain is understood as the storehouse of recorded sensations, and desire as the cause of all movement. The Universal One is within all things centring them and we are capable of apprehending this Centre within ourselves.

The process and desire of unfolding and refolding, also used as a principal metaphor by David Bohm, represents the dynamics of the two aspects of life, 'by dividing wholeness into parts, stillness into motion, unchanging into changing, unconditioned into conditioned, void into form, infinity into measure, eternity into time and immortality into mortality.' All expressions of energy spring from rest, seek a point of rest and return to a condition of rest. The underlying law of Creation is Rhythmic Balanced Interchange between polarities in all transactions in Nature. It is therefore important for us to understand this process and how it applies to ourselves: as we give, so we receive. Some of the main polarities are represented by male and female, gravity and radiativity, positive and negative, charge and discharge, plus and minus, growth and decay. Each of these principles is preponderant in one half of the cycle, so that opposites are born of each other like expansion from compression and compression from expansion (Yin from Yang and Yang from Yin). We can see in the example of water how expansion corresponds to the process leading from solid to liquid to gaseous while compression reverses the process.

Electricity is defined as the strain or tension set up by the two opposing desires of universal Mind thinking: the desire for balanced action and the desire for rest. The first is the separation from Oneness into unbalanced multiplicity and the other the voidance of multiplicity into balanced Oneness. All life seeks action and rest alternately. What Russell calls radiation is the female principle of creation unfolding from the seed while gravitation is the male principle refolding towards the seed; this is also present in the outbreath and the inbreath as two halves of one cycle. The Person or Being within us is immortal while bodies manifest the sequence of life-death-resurrection (or appearance and disappearance leading to reappearance, fulfilling Nature's law of repetition). Russell explains that the 'constant refolding process which man calls death is recorded as it refolds for repetition in his next life-cycle' - a subtle formulation of karma as we evolve towards knowing the Light of Self within us. In the process, we gradually lose our individuality and become more that Universal Self. The Bulgarian sage Beinsa Douno (Peter Deunov) did not want his name on his gravestone, but only Love, Wisdom, Truth, Virtue, Justice.

The last part of the book explains the postulates of this philosophy with many helpful diagrams elaborating on this central unfolding-refolding principle: actions unfold formlessness into form, while reactions move in the opposite direction. The incandescent sphere is the other end of the polarity of the cold cube, the first representing expansion into solid form, followed by melting back in the direction of incandescent: 'bodies are formed by freezing and voided by melting.' All motion is spiralling outwards and back again, the thrust of radiation followed by the pull of gravitation, or extension followed by retraction, integration by disintegration.

I hope that I have managed to convey some of the brilliance of this formulation, applying as it does to all manifestations of life. Readers will find that there is a whole series of books by Russell for those wishing to study this philosophy in more detail. I would recommend beginning with the Glenn Clark book and moving on to this one if you have the stamina. I shall certainly be returning to it on a regular basis. There is an anecdote about Bertrand (Earl) Russell and Lord Russell of Liverpool in which the former suggested that, since they were often being mistaken for each other, they should write to the Times along these lines: Sir, neither of us is the other. It is ironic that Bertrand Russell and Walter Russell are almost exact contemporaries but with such hugely contrasting philosophies. Ultimately, I suspect that Walter will long outlast Bertrand, but perhaps not in our leading universities.