Tesla

As noted in Candle (experiments with) and Candle (experiments with II), I have experienced these red electric balls of light in my vision since I went to Hartsfell—these are visible when I close my eyes and resolve into a circle. Just look at what Nikola Tesla experienced:

“On my return to the city that night, I felt a positive sensation that my brain had caught fire. I was a light as though a small sun was located in it and I passed the whole night applying cold compressions to my tortured head. Finally the flashes diminished in frequency and force but it took more than three weeks before they wholly subsided. When a second invitation was extended to me, my answer was an emphatic NO!

These luminous phenomena still manifest themselves from time to time, as when a new idea opening up possibilities strikes me, but they are no longer exciting, being of relatively small intensity. When I close my eyes I invariably observe first, a background of very dark and uniform blue, not unlike the sky on a clear but starless night [my emphasis].

In a few seconds this field becomes animated with innumerable scintillating flakes of green, arranged in several layers and advancing towards me. Then there appears, to the right, a beautiful pattern of two systems of parallel and closely spaced lines, at right angles to one another, in all sorts of colours with yellow, green, and gold predominating.

Immediately thereafter, the lines grow brighter and the whole is thickly sprinkled with dots of twinkling light. This picture moves slowly across the field of vision and in about ten seconds vanishes on the left, leaving behind a ground of rather unpleasant and inert grey until the second phase is reached.

Every time, before falling asleep, images of persons or objects flit before my view. When I see them I know I am about to lose consciousness. If they are absent and refuse to come, it means a sleepless night. To what an extent imagination played in my early life, I may illustrate by another odd experience.”

It is the same phenomenon exactly—with Tesla’s inventions coming to him as complete images, after, for example, contemplating the setting sun and the poetry of Goethe (a perfect combination of science and art—and was not Goethe himself an alchemist?).

I think the “starless night” is significant too—for I hold that the starless night is “the Godhead”, the unmoved mover. It is the black cloak upon which the jewels, the stars, are spread—every star being a god or a hero.

Tesla notes earlier:

“I was about twelve years of age when I first succeeded in banishing an image from my vision by wilful effort, but I never had any control over the flashes of light to which I have referred. They were, perhaps, my strangest and [most] inexplicable experience. They usually occurred when I found myself in a dangerous or distressing situations or when I was greatly exhilarated.

In some instances I have seen all the air around me filled with tongues of living flame. Their intensity, instead of diminishing, increased with time and seemingly attained a maximum when I was about twenty-five years old.”

Tesla discusses these experiences in relation to efforts he made to control his will and to control the images that entered into his head. He notes that this “lightning” appeared in moments of danger—this accords with Evola’s observation that the magical will often makes a spontaneous manifestation in moments of danger. Since the young Tesla was already trying to control his will, we can say these events helped to trigger his magical will. Hence Tesla’s inventions came from “another world”.