Walter Russell

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Universal One (1926), The Secret of Light (1947) and The Message of the Divine Iliad.

The still Light

Russell teaches that there is one substance, and it is Mind, which he calls the still magnetic white Light of God. It does not move and is not divided. Everything that seems to exist, matter, motion, energy, is an appearance produced in that stillness, as waves of motion seem to rise out of the still Light and return to it. The world of the senses is real as an appearance and unreal as a thing in itself, and the one who knows this knows that God is not far off but is the Light of every mind.

The divided pairs

Creation, in his teaching, begins when the one Light seems to divide into two opposite and equal halves, and every created thing is such a pair. Electricity divides the one into two and drives them apart; magnetism, the stillness of the Light, holds them in balance and draws them back to unity. So every thing has its opposite and is held to it, and every motion is a wave with two halves: a half that compresses, gathers and charges, which he calls generation and in which gravity works; and a half that expands, spreads and discharges, which he calls radiation. Nothing in nature moves one way only.

He draws the forms these motions take: the ball of matter that gathers at the centre of each wave field, and the cube of space that bounds it, the cube and the ball within it being for him the two shapes of the universe. He drew the elements as a spiral of octaves, each element a tone of a scale, rising toward the centre of each octave and falling away from it.

Rhythmic balanced interchange

The law that governs all the pairs is what he calls rhythmic balanced interchange: whatever is given out is given back, in equal measure and in rhythm. A breath in is balanced by a breath out, a wave's rise by its fall, a seed's growth by its return to the earth. He holds it to be the law of human life as well: whoever gives receives in the same measure, and whoever takes without giving breaks the balance and suffers its return. The golden rule is therefore not a counsel but the law of nature itself, and what is true of two people is true of nations and of business.

Mind, genius and the message

Since each person is an extension of the one Mind, he teaches that each can know it directly, and that genius is nothing but such knowing: the inspiration of one who has become still enough to hear the Light within. Mediocrity, in his saying, is what a person does to themselves, and genius what they give themselves. The Message of the Divine Iliad is written as the voice of God speaking to the one who listens: know that you are Light, rest in the stillness within, and give as the universe gives. The course he wrote with his wife Lao joins this to the conduct of a whole life, in work, marriage and service.

His cosmology is his own; it is no part of the physics of the laboratories, and the house teaches it as the vision of a painter and sculptor who believed he had seen the order of the world.