Was Nikola Tesla a Mystic?

Nikola Tesla was probably the strangest man America ever knew. Undoubtedly, he stands among the great men of our time. In the minds of many, he is one of the greatest of all time. Certainly, he ranks with the most brilliant inventors. He counted 115 patents granted him by the United States Government, and held many others from foreign countries.

Tesla’s mind was photographic, encyclopedic. If he read information once, he could repeat it, nearly verbatim, years afterward. He saw each invention as a unit. He completed it to the finest detail, in his mind, before ever beginning to put it into actuality. Without even a sketch to refresh his memory, he could build a machine or a device, years after he had ‘thought it out.’

Not only was he able to receive, intercept, or select the ideas he needed from that highest Source - or from wherever ideas come - but he was also able to so mentally manipulate their exterior design, their three-dimensional material coatings, before he began to build them, that he needed no other preparation. He was, most emphatically, not a cut-and-try inventor.

To be so in tune as to accomplish such results would in itself establish a firm foundation in concluding that Tesla was indeed a mystic. However, Tesla himself would have been the first to deny such a conclusion. Several times he appeared to wish to make it plain he believed the Soul of man was part of the body, and that when the body died the Soul died with it. But did he really believe that which he indicated?

Could he, for instance, have pondered, even slightly, his greatest invention, the rotating magnetic field, which makes the alternating current induction motor possible, and see only the ‘science’ of it? Could he ponder it and only feel the mechanics of it, only know the physical effect making it possible?

Probably, no man has accomplished greater feats in bending to his will the force we choose to call electricity than did Tesla, but he never learned what that force was! Nikola Tesla was a strange man, but it is quite inconceivable that he was so strange as to have never pondered what he was actually manipulating, where it came from, or why - and most of all - why he was picked to do the manipulating! As always, the world was then full of bright young men.

Is it possible Tesla was afraid of those things he could not work out fully in his mind? Being afraid of them, perhaps he hid them behind the door, so to speak, by denying them. Or, could it be he felt, in his younger days, that his scientific position in the world was insecure - insecure enough so that he must avoid anything which might shake it? Then, in later life, perhaps he did not wish to admit he had been wrong earlier, that he had not been able to work out everything in his mind beforehand?

Tesla never got around to writing his memoirs. Thus we will never be sure just what he really thought. Nor would he allow anyone else to write a biography of his life while he was alive. So, as is the case with many others who have seemed to tap the Universal Flow, one way or another, Tesla died with most of his secrets in his head. He believed he would live to the age of 130 years, or perhaps to 150. When he reached 80, he felt he had much time left. Being the thinking man he was, how he could rationalize all the months he had spent in bed, with serious illnesses, with his reaching an age of even 100 years is difficult to understand. But again, Nikola Tesla was a strange man.

When he was but 12 years old, Tesla learned that deep, rhythmical breathing overventilated his lungs, driving out residual carbon dioxide and stimulating them with hard-working oxygen. This changed the chemical balance of his body. It set his brain to producing experiences similar to those known to occult practitioners. While there are no records of Tesla doing his deep breathing to the extent of experiencing levitation, there appear to be such records where other workers have been concerned.

Everything Tesla did leads us to conclude he was an original thinker. He was constantly reaching out for new concepts, eager to prove them once they entered his consciousness. If he happened upon a demonstration unknown to him, he was always alert afterward for places he might apply it in original ways. Especially, was he interested in ‘trigger actions,’ actions by which slight applications of force would develop and release concentrations of force.

His first lesson in this came while he was still a boy. He was hiking in the mountains of his native Lika - which is now a part of Yugoslavia - when he was caught in a wet snowstorm. Boys and snowballs go together. Young Nik moulded some between his palms and threw them down a hill. They rolled a short distance, grew as they rolled, then stopped against some stump or fallen branch. It was absorbing to watch - until the final one.

For this last one, conditions, time, and place were all correct. He threw the snowball. It rolled and grew, and kept rolling and growing. The mountainside was long. The snowball grew bigger and bigger. It picked up fallen brush and forest litter with the added snow. Its speed increased rapidly as it expanded. The great ball snapped off small trees and wound them into its speeding, increasing mass. Young Tesla looked on in awe - spellbound, transfixed.

The awe changed to horror as the rushing giant began picking up large rocks with its snow. It tore out, or snapped off full-grown trees and wound them, like an octopus, into its rumbling, trampling, crushing path of destruction.

This monster finally landed in a valley below. Its crash shook the surrounding mountains with near earthquake proportions. Tesla never forgot what Nature can do if conditions are correct!

Alchemy and Illumination

At one time during his early college life, Tesla was the sufferer of a peculiar disease. Yet, was it a disease? All his bodily senses became extremely acute, so keen in fact that he could hardly live with them. The ticking of a watch, several rooms away, sounded like the ringing strike of a heavy hammer on an anvil. The vibrations of ordinary city traffic seemed like a continuous earthquake. The feeblest light was like the sting of a lightning flash. The slightest touch on his skin felt as if he had received a crushing blow. His heart would race at 150 pounding-beats per minute, and then would fall to almost no beats at all.

His condition attracted attention of several renowned doctors, but they could do nothing for him. He was undoubtedly fighting for his life and he was fighting against an invisible something no one appeared to know anything about. This illness occurred during the time he was struggling to develop the rudiments of his alternating current induction motor. He knew, intuitively, during those months of illness that he was coming nearer and nearer to the solution of his invention; yet, he felt as if he were a fly in the sticky meshes of a giant spider web. He believed that his determination to live to work out the problem of his motor kept him from dying. In other words, he felt he must live to bear this child. It apparently did not occur to him that it might have been the particular problem which caused the condition, that he might have been ‘anointed with oil,’ so to speak.

He lived, but the brain child was not born for many months. When it was born, it arrived in a sunset!

This happened in Budapest. It was a mild February afternoon in 1882. Tesla sauntered about a city park with a friend. A flaming sunset crept over the city. The vast orchestra of clouds swelled into a symphony of color, then rose to a crescendo. Tesla was reciting lines of Goethe’s Faust to his friend. He never finished those lines, for out of the glorious colors came something. Tesla stopped - mouth open. A light flooded his eyes and burned like the light in the sky. And then the answer to his induction motor problem came! Tesla saw it in full detail. Each part fit precisely. The windings were exact, the diagram of connections complete - and one of the greatest boons to mankind was indelibly incised on Tesla’s mind. In those few seconds, Nikola Tesla had made it possible to put the men of the earth on wheels!

Material Results

It was more than a year later before he found time and facilities to actually construct a working model of his apparatus. It was in a Strassburg machine shop, when without a drawing, a sketch, or a written note of any sort, Tesla built, piece by piece, his first model. He knew the different pieces would fit together because he had ‘thought them out.’ When all parts were finished, he began to assemble them. All of them did fit! His apparatus worked as smoothly, forward and reverse, as any induction motor built today.

In 1892, Tesla wrote a lecture entitled, “Experiments with Alternating Current of High Frequency and High Potential.” In 1904 this lecture was published in book form. On pages 53 through 58, he relates information regarding his “one-wire motor” and his “no-wire motor,” as well as various data on lighting vacuum and semi-vacuum tubes. Our neon signs of today are the result of Tesla’s early work, and so is much of our X-ray knowledge.

Just as harmonics play an important role in the vibration range we call music, Tesla learned early in his experiments that coils of wire, or inductances, respond to harmonic vibrations in the alternating electric current field. He found while experimenting with a coil wound for a specific wavelength that certain other coils in his laboratory reacted also, whereas others did not. Investigation proved that the coils which reacted bore a definite relationship to the one with which he was working. This relationship was discovered to be a ‘harmonic’ wavelength.

Some present-day investigators believe it is possible to tap the Cosmos for energy if we learn how to tune in on its oscillations including proper harmonic relationships. And it is in these oscillatory harmonic relationships that apparently the physical and metaphysical may be able to first join hands. Thus again we see, Tesla was approaching closer to occult matters than perhaps even he knew.

The full story of what Tesla accomplished during his Colorado experiments was never published - and never will be known. It passed with Tesla. It is known, however, that he himself was completely satisfied that the earth was highly charged with electricity and that Nature had some mysterious way of keeping it so charged. Thus, it would appear, that those who have contended the earth was a gigantic dynamo whose energy could be tapped, were - and are - not so ‘scatter-brained’ as some would be pleased to have us believe. Perhaps with proper harmonics established on the top of a rod thrust into the earth, we could do away with the unsightly poles and the wires upon them!

In Colorado, Tesla definitely ascertained that electric power could be both transmitted and received without wires. He actually accomplished this over a distance of more than 25 miles. When this fact is coupled with that of his learning that the earth was highly charged electrically, there is considerable evidence pointing toward the probability of existence of ‘free power’ in the earth - or Cosmos - or both.

If we need further evidence that Nikola Tesla had more than a touch of mysticism about him, we will find it on pages 316 and 317 of John J. O’Neill’s book, Prodigal Genius, the Life of Nikola Tesla. Here is revealed one of the most beautiful stories ever written about any scientist - a story that fills the throat full, that touches the very depths of the heart.

The White Light

Tesla loved New York City’s pigeons. He fed them for years - even at the expense of his own eating! In the hotels where he lived, his window was always open so his favorites could fly inside and rest in the nests he had especially built for them. Among his favorites, Tesla had one which he held very dearly. She was pure white with light gray tips on her wings. He said that no matter where he went this pigeon would find him. If he should want her, he would merely call and she would always come, no matter how far away she was. Tesla loved this bird, and he believed that she loved him. He felt that so long as he had her, there seemed a purpose in his life.

Tesla told this story: one night as he lay in the darkness of his room working out problems as usual, this pigeon flew in through the open window and perched on the top of his desk. He said he knew she wanted him, she wanted to tell him something important. He got up from his bed and went to her.

Tesla knew as soon as he looked at her what it was she came to tell him. She was dying. This knowledge came to him from a powerful beam of light through her eyes. He said this light was intense; it was brilliant to the point of being dazzling, - and white. It was more powerful, he explained, than any light he had ever produced in his laboratory.

When the pigeon died, something went out of Tesla’s life. Up to that moment he had always possessed the feeling that he would fully accomplish anything he began, no matter how ambitious the plan might be. But after that moment, he knew his lifework was finished - and it seems to have been!

He continued to feed the pigeons every day. He appeared to be looking for something, or someone, among them. When asked about this, he answered only, “After all, who can tell -.”

Nikola Tesla died as he had lived most of his life - alone. During the last few months of 1942, he remained in bed most of the time. His mind was alert but he seemed weak physically. He had requested the hotel employees not to bother him unless he wanted something. On Tuesday morning, January 5, he permitted a maid to come and straighten up his room. Then he gave orders that it be closely guarded because he did not wish to be disturbed. Nothing more was ever heard from Nikola Tesla. As far as is known, those were his last words.

On Friday, January 8, a maid entered his room and found Tesla dead.

The police were notified. The Coroner’s decision was that Tesla had died a natural death the night before - January 7, 1943. Representatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation came and opened a safe in his room. It is reported that they removed papers for examination. Tesla was supposed to have been working on a secret invention which might have had a war potentiality.

Because of the war, Nikola Tesla’s death received only scant headlines. Because of the tumult since, he has nearly been forgotten - but not quite. Recently, a group of Tesla admirers, headed by Mr. Leland I. Anderson, formed The Tesla Society. A great deal has been accomplished toward collecting Teslana and there are preparations afoot for important recognition of Tesla’s 100th birthday in 1956.

Out of a dazzling sunset came Tesla’s greatest invention - and his career was launched. Out of a dazzling white light from a pigeon’s eye came that career’s end. Was Nikola Tesla a mystic?

If good is a reality, it must be experienced. Therefore, no man sins who knows not the good. But every man sins who refuses to know the good. Thus, the greatest sin of all is wilful ignorance.

- Validivar