Walter Russell

Biography

Born in Boston on May 19, 1871, to Nova Scotian immigrants, Russell left school at age 9 1/2 and went to work, then put himself through the Massachusetts Normal Art School. He interrupted his fourth year to spend three months in Paris at the Académie Julian. Biographer Glenn Clark identifies four instructors who prepared him for an art career: Albert Munsell and Ernest Major in Boston, Howard Pyle in Philadelphia, and Jean-Paul Laurens in Paris.

In his youth, Russell earned money as a church organist and by leading small orchestras. His compositions, mostly waltzes, were acknowledged by Ignace Paderewski in Boston in 1891 or 1892, and on a later occasion by him in New York.

"Mr. Russell eventually turned himself into one of the most self-made Americans since Benjamin Franklin." Before he left Boston in 1894, Russell married Helen Andrews (1874-1953) and traveled to Paris for their wedding trip and a second term for him at the Académie Julian.

After their wedding trip, Russell and his wife settled in New York in 1894 and had two daughters, Helen and Louise. Russell's rise in New York was immediate; a reporter wrote in 1908, "Mr. Russell came here from Boston and at once became a great artistic success."

Walter Russell's careers as an illustrator, correspondent in the Spanish–American War, child portrait painter and builder are detailed in several questionnaires he answered and submitted to Who's Who in America.

He attracted widespread attention with his allegorical painting "The Might of Ages" in 1900. The painting represented the United States at the Turin international exhibition and won several awards.

By 1903, Russell had published three children's books (The Sea Children, The Bending of the Twig, and The Age of Innocence) and qualified for the Authors Club, which he joined in 1902.

Russell made his mark as a builder, creating $30 million worth of top-quality 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 is considered his masterpiece. Designed by the architect George Mort Pollard, the building has been home to many of the famed and illustrious, including Noel Coward, Isadora Duncan, writer Fannie Hurst, New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay, Alexander Woollcott, and Norman Rockwell.

In the 1930s, Russell was employed by Thomas J. Watson, chairman of IBM, as a motivational speaker for IBM employees. One of the employees wrote, "I consider Walter Russell's talk last night one of the finest I have ever heard. His informal talk on Personal Power created a burning desire within us to make greater use of the personal power we possess... every man present is a better man as a result of his inspiring message." He was employed at IBM for twelve years, during which time he and Watson developed a new concept of utilitarian business ethics.

At age 56 he turned to sculpture and fashioned portrait busts of Thomas Edison, Mark Twain, General MacArthur, John Philip Sousa, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Charles Goodyear, George Gershwin and others. He rose to top rank as a sculptor. He won the commissions for the Mark Twain Memorial (1934) and for President Franklin D. Roosevelt's The Four Freedoms (1943).

Russell became a leader in the Science of Man Movement when he was elected president of the Society of Arts and Sciences in 1927. His seven-year tenure generated many articles in the New York Times. The gold medals awarded by the Society were highly valued.

As World War II approached, he moved into a top-floor studio at Carnegie Hall, where he lived alone (his estranged wife Helen lived in Connecticut). At the time, he was supervising the casting of the Four Freedoms. This was a low time that required a rejuvenation of his health and spirit. There were reports of his "egotism and self-aggrandizement" that bothered him.

The Russell Cosmogony

In May 1921 Russell experienced a transformational revelatory event that he later described in a chapter called "The Story of My Illumining" in the 1950 edition of his Home Study Course. "During that period...I could perceive all motion," and was newly "aware of all things." Russell used the terminology of Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke in his book Cosmic Consciousness to explain the phenomenon of "cosmic illumination." Later he wrote, "It will be remembered that no one who has ever had [the experience of illumination] has been able to explain it. I deem it my duty to the world to tell of it." What was revealed to Russell "in the Light" is the subject matter of The Divine Iliad'', published in two volumes in 1949.

After five years of preparation, Russell was ready to challenge the field of theoretical physics with his new knowledge. He published The Universal One (1926) and The Russell Genero-Radiative Concept (1930) and defended his ideas in the pages of the New York Times in 1930-1931.

From the debate with scientists came a tag-line for the Russell Cosmogony, the "Two-Way Universe" of gravitation and radiation. "Gravity and radiativity are opposite pressure conditions. They perpetually void themselves by giving to the other." The ideas are further developed in The Secret of Light (1947) and A New Concept of the Universe (1953).

The Russell Cosmogony is a new concept of the universe, explaining the relationships between matter and energy, and between electricity and magnetism. It describes the process of Creation, the nature of atomic and stellar systems, the Natural Laws that govern the universe (The Voidance Principle, periodicity, the Law of Balance, etc.), and man's relation to God and the universe. An engineer who learned of the Russell Cosmogony in 1930 commented, "If Russell's theories are sound, they will be of utmost value, as he shows that there can be but one substance, and that the difference [among the elements] is a dimensional difference and not a difference of substance. In other words, if Russell's theories are right, transmutation can be reduced to a practical reality."

Russell wrote that "the cardinal error of science" is "shutting the Creator out of his Creation." Russell never referred to an anthropomorphic god, but rather wrote that "God is the invisible, motionless, sexless, undivided, and unconditioned white Magnetic Light of Mind" which centers all things. "God is provable by laboratory methods," Russell wrote, "The locatable motionless Light which man calls magnetism is the Light which God IS." He wrote that Religion and Science must come together in a New Age.

With Lao Russell at Swannanoa in Virginia 1948-1963

Russell's life was changed by a phone call from Daisy (Cook) Stebbing in 1946. Daisy was an immigrant from England, a former model and businesswoman, who was living in Boston. She had read Glenn Clark's book, "The Man Who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe." In 1948, Walter at age 77 divorced his first wife and married Daisy Stebbing age 44, amid some controversy. She changed her name to Lao (after Lao-Tzu, the Chinese illuminate) and they embarked on a cross-country automobile trip from Reno looking for a place to establish a workplace and a museum for his work. They discovered Swannanoa, the palatial estate of a railroad magnate, long abandoned, on a mountaintop outside of Waynesboro, Virginia. The estate was not for sale, but they leased it for fifty years.

There they established the museum and the Walter Russell Foundation, and in 1957 the Commonwealth of Virginia granted a charter for the University of Science and Philosophy, a correspondence school with a home study course. Walter and Lao Russell collaborated on a number of books. The testing of atomic bombs in the atmosphere prompted them to publish "Atomic Suicide?" in 1957 in which they warned of grave consequences for the planet and for humankind if radioactivity was exploited as a world fuel. The Test-Ban Treaty of 1963 lessened the threat, but they maintained that the danger of the radioactive poisoning of the biosphere would remain a pressing issue. Walter Russell was productive up to his death in 1963. Lao died in 1988. Although the University left Swannanoa in 1998, Walter and Lao's books continue to enjoy brisk sales and worldwide distribution.

The Secret of Light

Russell wrote in 1947: "For within the secret of Light is vast knowledge not yet revealed to man. Light is all there is. "If science knew what LIGHT actually IS, instead of the waves and corpuscles of incandescent suns which science now thinks it is, a new civilization would arise from that fact alone."> "Revelation of the nature of Light will be the inheritance of man in the coming New Age of greater comprehension." When The Secret of Light was published, popular historian Dr. Francis Trevelyan (1877-1959) sent an unsolicited letter of praise. He wrote of the "tremendous magnitude of thought expressed in this little volume," and Walter Russell's "courage and vision" to explore the natural laws which science, hitherto, "has not attempted to define."

Russell and the New Age

The New Age Movement which emerged in the 1970s seems to be unrelated to Walter Russell's use of the term New Age. Walter Russell referred to a New Age in June 1932 when he answered questions for John Dittemore in a pamphlet about the Universal One (published in 1926), in 1943 in the draft to The Cosmic Plan (never published), in the Divine Iliad II in 1949 (p. 257), and in the New Concept of the Universe in February 1953. Russell saw a New Age coming in human relations,"as transmutation slowly unfolds its new world for man" and as a result of the marriage of Religion and Science.

Russell accepted Richard Maurice Bucke's premise that not only the human body, but also human consciousness, had evolved in stages, that human consciousness periodically made iterative leaps, such as that from animal awareness to rational self-awareness, many millennia ago. Russell believed that humankind was on the brink of making another key, evolutionary leap in consciousness. The next cycle of human evolution, said Bucke, would be from rational self-consciousness to spiritual super-consciousness on the order of that experienced by sages, artists and illuminates of the past 2,500 years,' such as The Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Mohammed, the unknown author of the Bhagavad-Gita, Moses, Jesus, Zoroaster, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Emerson, Eddy, Whitman etc. "Without these few illuminati, the world of man would still be primate."

In 1947–48, Russell wrote: "This New Age is marking the dawn of a new world-thought. That new thought is a new cosmic concept of the value of man to man. The whole world is discovering that all mankind is one and that the unity of man is real – not just an abstract idea. Mankind is beginning to discover that the hurt of any man hurts every man, and, conversely, the uplift of any man uplifts every man." He maintained that students of the Russell Cosmogony would be the "seeds" of the New Age.

Legacy of Walter Russell

Russell's Cosmogony is a work of natural philosophy, not science as we think of it these days, but it has the ideas to transform Science; neither is Russell a theologian, but his cosmogony has the potential to transform Religion. British physicist Sir Oliver Lodge wrote (1929) that future investigations will result in "no merely material prospect that will be opening on our view, but some glimpse into a region of the universe which Science has never entered yet, but which has been sought from afar, and perhaps blindly apprehended, by painter and poet, by philosopher and saint." Similarly, Friedrich Gottlieb Brieger (1872-1948), an associate of Russell in the 1930s, wrote, "Call [Walter Russell] a fantastic dreamer if you will, but after all, we must believe in dreamers. Without them the realist would make scant progress and man would still be primitive.

Books

Books published after his death: