Scrimshawed Ostrich Egg, 19th Century

Paul Klee (December 18, 1879 – June 29, 1940), Dream City, 1921.

In May 1921, American polymath Walter Russell entered a 39-day coma-like state, during which he claimed to have accessed “the source of all knowledge.” Upon awakening, he frantically wrote down what he had seen — pages filled with philosophical, scientific, and spiritual revelations that would later form the foundation of his manuscript *The Universal One*. Though he sent his findings to 500 leading minds of the time, nearly all dismissed him as mad — except one. Nikola Tesla, the visionary inventor, was so struck by Russell’s insights that he urged him to seal the work away for a thousand years, insisting that humanity was not yet ready for its truths.

Walter Russell’s revelations reimagined the very structure of reality. He argued that matter was not solid but crystallized light slowed by thought — that everything around us, from rocks to human bodies, was composed of light patterns, shaped by consciousness. He believed the universe was fundamentally mental, not material, and that all things moved in rhythmic cycles — expansion and contraction, like breath. He dismissed opposites like good and evil as illusions, asserting instead that everything sought harmony and balance. To Russell, death wasn’t an end but the release of compressed light returning to its source. Even time, he claimed, wasn’t linear, but a spiral where past, present, and future coexisted.

These ideas were radically ahead of their time, blending metaphysics, wave dynamics, and a deep sense of universal unity. He believed electricity was a living spiral of energy, not merely electrons in motion, and that the vacuum of space was in fact a vibrant sea of untapped potential. Health, in his view, was the natural rhythm of the body, and disease was simply a disruption of that flow. Though ignored or ridiculed during his lifetime, Russell’s work now draws new attention in an era where quantum physics and consciousness studies begin to echo the same questions. To many, he is no longer a forgotten eccentric, but a prophet of a paradigm yet to come.

diamonds with garnet inclusions

dendrite trees

Charles Brooks Photographs the Interiors of Musical and Scientific Instruments

Mayan eccentric flints, 500 - 800 A.D. 

Eccentric flints, such as these, were sacred, high status offerings and evidence of the skill and technology of the Mayan workshops. A tapered base at the bottom may have been attached to a staff or scepter.