The Man Tesla Told to Bury His Work for 1,000 Years—And Why His Ideas Still Matter Today

Picture Boston in 1871. A boy is born to Nova Scotian immigrants, drops out of school at nine years old, and goes to work. No silver spoon. No trust fund. No formal scientific training whatsoever.

By age 29, that same boy—Walter Russell—has his allegorical painting The Might of Ages representing the United States at the Turin International Exhibition, collecting awards across Europe. He’ll go on to build $30 million worth of cooperative apartments in New York City, sculpt busts of Mark Twain and Thomas Edison, work as a motivational speaker for IBM, and get elected president of the Society of Arts and Sciences.

But none of that is why we’re talking about him.

We’re talking about him because in May 1921, at age 49, Russell claims to have experienced a 39-day period of what he called “cosmic illumination”—a profound altered state where, according to his own words, “the entirety of the secrets of Creation were mine to know.” His family was so concerned they consulted specialists about whether he needed psychiatric care. The doctors, intrigued by his detailed recordings, sensed something unusual was happening.

What emerged from those 39 days would become The Universal One, published in 1926—a sweeping cosmology that attempted to unify science and consciousness, matter and mind, physics and philosophy. Russell sent copies to over 500 leading scientists of his day.

Almost all of them dismissed it.

Except one.

Nikola Tesla—the man who gave us alternating current and arguably understood electricity better than anyone alive—reportedly told Russell to lock his work away for a thousand years. “The world is not ready for it,” Tesla said.

Russell published anyway.

I’ve spent 15 years coaching high-performers across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and boardrooms throughout Europe and the US. I’ve read the philosophy, the science, the self-help canon. And nothing—nothing—has shaped my R.I.S.E.™ system quite like the principles Russell laid out nearly a century ago. Not because he was right about everything scientifically. But because the man understood something about consciousness, balance, and human potential that most of us are still catching up to.

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Who Was Walter Russell, Really?

The biographical details alone make him sound like fiction.

Born in Boston on May 19, 1871, to Nova Scotian immigrants, Russell left school at age 9 and went to work. He taught himself music, earned money as a church organist, then somehow put himself through the Massachusetts Normal Art School, even spending time studying at the prestigious Académie Julian in Paris.

According to the Bioregulatory Medicine Institute, before he could walk or speak, he could play any tune he heard with one finger on the piano. At the age of seven, while playing marbles with other boys, he felt the urge to retreat into the solitude of the woods, where, for the first time, he experienced leaving his body and feeling the ecstasy of cosmic consciousness.

At 14, he contracted black diphtheria and was briefly pronounced dead—an experience that left him with what he described as deep spiritual insights about self-healing.

By his late twenties, Russell was painting portraits of the wealthy and famous. His painting The Might of Ages represented the United States at the Turin international exhibition and won several awards. He became a war correspondent during the Spanish-American War. He wrote children’s books. He joined the Authors Club.

Then came the real estate empire. Russell made his mark as a builder, creating $30 million worth of cooperative apartments. He is credited with developing “cooperative ownership into an economically sound and workable principle.” The Hotel des Artistes on West 67th Street in Manhattan—a building that’s housed writers, artists, and politicians for over a century—is considered his masterpiece.

In his fifties, he turned to sculpture, creating portrait busts of Edison, Twain, General MacArthur, George Gershwin, and others. He rose to top rank as a sculptor.

For 12 years, he worked for IBM chairman Thomas J. Watson as a motivational speaker, lecturing on what he called “rhythmic balanced interchange” and ethical principles in business.

The New York Herald Tribune called him “the modern Leonardo.”

And all of this—the painting, the sculpture, the buildings, the speaking—was just the first act.

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The Illumination That Changed Everything

In 1921, at the age of 49, Walter Russell experienced his Illumination into the Light of Cosmic Consciousness during a thirty nine day and night period.

He later described it this way: “The seat of sensation becomes completely severed from its centering conscious Mind for intervals… one becomes wholly Mind, the One Mind of God, in which exists all-knowledge, all-power, and all-presence.”

May of 1921, Walter Russell at the age of 49 years old experiences a 39 day and night period of illumination, writing down some 40,000 words given to him from the Light of Cosmic Consciousness.

Whether you interpret this as mystical revelation, psychological breakthrough, or something in between, what matters is what he did with it. He spent five years translating his experience into charts, diagrams, and dense explanatory text. The result was The Universal One, first published in 1926.

At its core, Russell’s cosmology asserts something radical: There is but One universe, One Mind, One force, One substance.

Matter, in Russell’s view, isn’t separate from consciousness. It’s crystallized light—”frozen” thought-waves held temporarily in form. The visible world is simply the invisible world expressing itself through rhythmic cycles of expansion and contraction.

He drew intricate diagrams showing how the periodic table of elements could be organized into “octaves” like musical notes. His spiral charts of the atomic table, copyrighted in 1926, predicted the discovery of the transuranic elements Plutonium and Neptunium, as well as the now-familiar elements of “heavy water, Deuterium and Tritium”—years before they were isolated in research labs.

Did Russell get everything right? No. His alternative periodic table never replaced Mendeleev’s. His theories about gravity and magnetism challenged Newtonian physics in ways that mainstream science didn’t accept. Russell wrote extensively on science topics, but his ideas were rejected by scientists.

But here’s what’s interesting: In 1941, the American Academy of Sciences conferred a doctorate on him, after several laboratories had isolated the elements which he had foreseen: Deuterium, Tritium, Neptunium and Plutonium.

Whether you consider him prophet or lucky guesser, the man saw patterns others didn’t.

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Tesla’s Warning—And Why Russell Ignored It

The friendship between Russell and Tesla remains one of the more intriguing footnotes in the history of alternative science.

Russell thought the world of Tesla. They eventually became friends as both men lived and worked in New York City for a time. Both challenged mainstream scientific orthodoxy. Both believed electricity was more fundamental to the universe than most scientists acknowledged. Both were largely dismissed or forgotten by the establishment of their day, only to be rediscovered later.

After reading The Universal One, Tesla reportedly told Russell his ideas were too advanced. Tesla admired Russell’s philosophy, even if he warned him to keep it hidden.

“Lock it in a safe for a thousand years,” Tesla supposedly said. “Humanity is not ready.”

Russell’s wife Lao later felt otherwise. Given what she saw as the destructive direction humanity was heading—nuclear weapons, environmental degradation—she believed releasing this knowledge was necessary, not dangerous.

Russell himself wrote: “Science laughed at it, scoffed at it, and threw it in the wastebasket. And then gradually discovered that what I had written was so, and men took those ideas as their own.”

Was Russell ahead of his time or simply outside his lane? Both, probably. His intuitive leaps anticipated concepts quantum physics would later wrestle with—the observer effect, wave-particle duality, the role of consciousness in shaping matter. But he lacked the mathematical framework that would have made his work legible to the scientific establishment.

Russell described his cosmogony in A New Concept of the Universe (1953), where he wrote that “the cardinal error of science” was “shutting the Creator out of his Creation.”

That sentence alone was enough to get him dismissed by many. But it’s also the sentence that made him matter to people like me.

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Six Principles That Rewire How You Think

I’m not here to validate Russell as hard science. I’m here to tell you that when you strip away the dense text and unfamiliar terminology, he left behind a set of principles that are as practical as they are profound.

These are the ideas that inform my R.I.S.E.™ system. They’ve helped executives close eight-figure deals, CEOs escape decades-old victim narratives, and burned-out founders reclaim their creative fire.

1. Everything Is Mind Expressing Itself

Russell didn’t see separation between you, your goals, and the universe around you. In his view, there’s one universal Mind thinking itself into form. Light becomes matter. Thought becomes reality.

This isn’t magical thinking—it’s a reframe. When you stop experiencing yourself as separate from what you’re trying to create, resistance drops. You’re not fighting the universe; you’re expressing through it.

Practical application: That business you want to build? That relationship you want to heal? Stop treating it as something “out there” that you have to capture. Start treating it as something you’re already part of that’s waiting to emerge.

2. There Is No Death—Only Transformation

Russell saw the universe operating in eternal cycles—expansion and contraction, generation and degeneration, what he called “rhythmic balanced interchange.” Death, in this view, isn’t an ending. It’s a rest between heartbeats.

This reframe alone has saved several of my clients from paralysis. The fear of failure—of “losing” something—dissolves when you realize nothing actually ends. It only transforms.

Lose the job? Transformation. End the relationship? Transformation. Crash and burn spectacularly? You’re composting for something new.

3. Thought Creates

Russell mapped a universe of electromagnetic thinking. Every form, from galaxies to cells to your next big idea, emerges from Mind desiring it into existence.

This isn’t about vision boards or positive affirmations (though those can help). It’s about recognizing that your mental patterns are not random noise—they’re shaping what you experience. Train them deliberately, or they run you.

This is the core of R.I.S.E.™ REVEAL: exposing the inherited mental “laws” you’ve been operating under that aren’t universal at all—they’re just programs running in the background.

4. Infinite Creativity Within Finite Rules

Russell didn’t believe in a universe without limits. There are constraints—speed of light, entropy, physical laws. But within those rails? Infinite expression.

This is why high-performers love this framework. It’s not overwhelming. There are rules. Master the cause, and you can work with all effects. It’s chess, not chaos.

R.I.S.E.™ SHIFT is about rewiring your nervous system to operate within universal laws rather than against them. Push against reality, reality wins. Work with its grain, and momentum builds.

5. Everything Transmutes

In Russell’s periodic table, elements weren’t fixed substances—they were light in different states, capable of changing form under the right conditions. Lead to gold wasn’t metaphor; it was (in his view) achievable physics.

The parallel to belief work is obvious. “I’m not enough” isn’t a permanent state. It’s a frequency. Change the conditions, and it transmutes into “I’m universal Mind expressing.”

This takes work—21 to 45 days of consistent neuroplasticity practice, in my experience. But I’ve seen the transformation happen hundreds of times.

6. Balance or Break

He posited that the universe was founded on a unifying principle of rhythmic balanced interchange.

Push too hard without rest, and collapse follows. All electric (action, aggression, pursuit) without magnetic (rest, receptivity, integration) creates burnout—in stars, empires, and people.

Most of my clients arrive burned out because they’re all push, no pull. They’ve optimized for one half of the cycle and wonder why they’re exhausted. R.I.S.E.™ EMBODY teaches the dance between masculine and feminine energy—action and reflection, output and input. Master the rhythm, and momentum becomes sustainable.

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Why Mainstream Science Dismissed Him—And Why That Doesn’t Matter Here

Let’s be clear: Russell’s Wikipedia entry notes gingerly that his ideology “has not been accepted by mainstream scientists.”

His work lacked peer review. His diagrams looked like science fiction to 1920s physicists. His claims about transmuting elements were never reliably replicated under laboratory conditions. His reliance on intuition over computation meant his descriptions often lacked the mathematical rigor that mainstream scientists demand.

That’s all fair.

But here’s the thing: I’m not running a physics lab. I’m working with human consciousness—with entrepreneurs, executives, and creatives who are stuck, burned out, or plateaued. In that domain, Russell’s principles aren’t pseudoscience. They’re practical philosophy with a century of quiet validation through lived experience.

Besides, as one writer noted about Russell: Or Russell’s assertion that thought shapes reality. Quantum mechanics, through the observer effect, already hints that consciousness plays a role in the manifestation of outcomes.

Science is catching up to questions Russell asked a hundred years ago. That doesn’t make him right about everything. But it makes him worth reading.

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The Legacy: From Virginia Mountaintop to Your Next Breakthrough

In 1948, at age 77, Russell married Daisy Stebbing, who changed her name to Lao (after Lao-Tzu). Together, they discovered Swannanoa, a palatial abandoned estate on a Virginia mountaintop. There they established the museum and the Walter Russell Foundation. In 1957 the Commonwealth of Virginia granted a charter for the University of Science and philosophy, a correspondence school with a home study course.

Russell lived there until his death on May 19, 1963—his 92nd birthday. Still painting cosmic diagrams. Still teaching. Still creating.

His wife Lao continued the work until her death in 1988. The foundation preserved his writings, his charts, his vision. Today, you can still find his books in print, his diagrams online, and a small but devoted community of researchers who continue to study his cosmology.

Is Walter Russell a forgotten genius? A cosmic crank? Probably some of both. What I know is that his principles—stripped of the dense scientific language and applied to human performance—work.

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The Russell Challenge: A 7-Day Experiment

If you’re skeptical, good. Stay skeptical. But also stay curious. Here’s a simple experiment:

Days 1-3: Spend 10 minutes each morning meditating on a single thought: “I am universal Mind expressing.” Don’t just think it—feel it in your cells. Notice what resistance comes up.

Days 4-5: Map one significant relationship in your life. Where’s the imbalance? Are you too “electric” (pushing, pursuing, forcing)? Or too “magnetic” (withdrawing, waiting, withholding)? What would balance look like?

Day 6: Take one limiting belief you carry—”I’m not creative,” “I’m too old to change,” “People like me don’t get opportunities like that”—and write its opposite. Speak that opposite 20 times daily. Out loud.

Day 7: Create something. Art, writing, a business pitch, a letter you’ve been putting off. Let it flow without judgment. Don’t edit. Just let Mind move through you.

Then notice what shifts.

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The Invitation

Russell saw what others couldn’t because he became the seeing. His illumination wasn’t something that happened to him—it was something he made himself available for through decades of curiosity, creation, and what he called “communing with Nature.”

“Seek to be alone much to commune with Nature,” he wrote, “and be thus inspired by her mighty whisperings within your consciousness.”

You have that same capacity. Not to replicate Russell’s cosmology, but to access your own version of clarity—the kind that cuts through the noise and shows you what’s actually real and what’s just inherited programming.

The Universal One isn’t light reading. It’s dense, challenging, and often frustrating. Read it anyway. Or start with The Secret of Light or The Man Who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe by Glenn Clark—the authorized biography that captures the essence without requiring a background in early 20th-century physics.

But reading isn’t enough. At some point, you have to apply it. You have to do the work.

That’s what R.I.S.E.™ is for:

• REVEAL: Expose the mental laws you’ve inherited that aren’t universal at all
• INTEGRATE: Balance your inner opposites—shadow and light, fear and power
• SHIFT: Rewire your thought patterns to match cosmic rhythms instead of survival loops
• EMBODY: Live as universal Mind expressing, not as a limited ego defending itself

If this resonates—if you’re tired of running programs that no longer serve you—let’s talk.

Dubai. Abu Dhabi. Online worldwide.

DM me. Let’s architect your epic life.

— Coach G
Dubai’s Life Coach | Mind Architect | R.I.S.E.™ Creator

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A note on sources: The biographical information in this article draws from Wikipedia, the University of Science and Philosophy’s historical timeline, biographical accounts from the Bioregulatory Medicine Institute, and various historical sources on Russell’s life and work. Russell’s ideas remain controversial within mainstream science, and this article presents them as a framework for personal development, not as validated physics.