The Russell Cosmogeny: Mind, Light and the Science of Creation

The State in the fire, as I call it, occurred spontaneously as I was leaving a house fire in the middle of the night near the end of October 2009. It was a State of severance from sensing, preceded by extrasensory flashes of the effects of creating.

At first, I had no words for the wholly dynamic yet purely qualitative ecstasy of the State itself beyond Love, Being Love, and Absolute Satiation. It was not until I found the works of Walter and Lao Russell that my writing moved beyond mystical poetry into a concrete, scientific discussion of the Divine Trinity of Creator and Creation — a cosmogeny qualitatively known beyond the senses.

What Is the Russell Cosmogeny?

The Russell Cosmogeny does not begin with matter or with a remote event in time. It begins eternally in the still, undivided Mind of Light/God/Source/Stillness/Zero Point/Interchanging Point/Higher Self — whatever one may desire to call “the Creator”.

Often described as the Walter Russell cosmology, it is more precisely a cosmogeny: an account of how the universe of moving effects is continuously sequentially extended from and back to its motionless Source as the balance of the Creator is expressed though patterns of Idea.

Walter and Lao Russell distinguish between the invisible universe of Cause and the visible universe of effect:

“Mind is spiritual and constitutes the invisible universe of CAUSE. Matter is physical and constitutes the visible universe of EFFECT.”

The physical universe is therefore not self-created matter moving independently through empty space. It is the patterned, light-wave record of God’s thinking: a rhythmic simulation of the one whole Idea held changelessly in Mind.

This overview presents the Russell Cosmogeny in its own terms. It is not an attempt to translate the Russellian language of Mind, Light and Creation into conventional physics.

God’s One Whole Idea

At the foundation of the Russell Cosmogeny is one uncompromising statement:

“God’s Mind has but one Idea. That Idea is Creation as a whole.”

Walter and Lao Russell identify Love as the one whole Idea of Creation. The Idea is eternally complete in the undivided Knowing of Mind. It does not develop, improve or become more complete through time.

Mind knows the whole Idea timelessly. Thinking takes that Idea apart and extends it into countless patterned relations and forms. What appears to the senses as a universe of many separate things is the electric record of this divided thinking. In the State in the fire, I knew the timelessness of the eternally repeating, ecstatic unfolding/refolding of the whole of Creation.

Creation, in its Reality, is Mind-Idea. Matter is the changing effect through which that Idea is manifested to the senses.

Knowing is whole and timeless. Thinking Idea into its parts is divided and sequential. The material universe records the sequences of Mind-thinking, but the record is not the Mind that knows and thinks it.

The Divine Trinity of Creator and Creation

The Home Study Course names the underlying structure of the Russell Cosmogeny the Divine Trinity of Creator and Creation (also described as The Divine Trinity of Knowledge & Thinking). It is also described as:

the Undivided;
the Divided;
and the United.

This is not a trinity of three separate beings or substances. It is the one undivided Knower, the two opposed extensions of Mind-thinking seeking to unify and simulate balance, and their continual balancing in the unity from which they could never actually depart.

God’s Mind-knowing is the balanced, undivided ONE. God’s Mind-thinking extends knowing into the dynamic TWO: equal and opposed conditions such as compression and expansion, generation and radiation, heat and cold, visibility and invisibility.

The Russells compare this relation to a two-way lever extending from a still fulcrum. The fulcrum does not move, yet all power expressed through the lever is extended from it. The lever has no power of its own.

Stillness does not become motion. Motion manifests the power of Stillness without ever containing that power within itself.

The divided TWO remain centered by the undivided ONE. Every moving effect is centered from within and controlled from without by still Magnetic Light. This is the fundamental three upon which the Russell Cosmogeny—and every light-wave within it — is based.

Still Magnetic Light and the Electric Universe

The Light of Mind-knowing is still, undivided and unconditioned. Walter and Lao Russell call it the Magnetic Light which God is. The Undivided Magnetic Light is Love. Love Thinking Love is qualitatively known as Love Being Love.

This still Magnetic Light is not a moving beam, an electromagnetic radiation or a material substance. It is the zero of Mind-knowing: the motionless equilibrium from which all divided effects are extended.

The two lights of Mind-thinking are electric. They are the opposed pulsations of two-way motion that produce thought-forms and record the Idea of Mind in patterned bodies in seeming motion.

The distinction is essential:

Magnetic Light is still Cause.
Electric light-wave interchange produces the seeming of changing effect.
Stillness imagining balanced forms is the ecstatic Reality.
The senses record the simulations of Idea.

Every effect begins in zero stillness, seeks unity in the manifest self to simulate balance and returns to the zero from which it began. Yet the zero itself neither moves nor becomes the effects extended from it.

Thinking never departs from Rest.

Rhythmic Balanced Interchange: The Law of Love

Walter and Lao Russell summarize the one universal law in three words:

“RHYTHMIC BALANCED INTERCHANGE.”

Rhythmic balanced interchange is the equal giving and regiving through which the universe of motion is eternally continued. It is Love expressed as law.

Every action is paired with an equal and opposite reaction. The Russell Cosmogeny adds an important distinction: action and reaction are not merely consecutive events.

“ACTION AND REACTION ARE EQUAL AND OPPOSITE. THEY ARE SIMULTANEOUSLY EXPRESSED AND SEQUENTIALLY REPEATED IN REVERSE.”

Every visible action has an invisible, simultaneous mate. The paired action and reaction are then repeated sequentially in reverse. In this manner, every effect is simultaneously balanced by the voidance of opposition, recorded and repeated in reverse.

Nothing is allowed to escape the balance of the whole. No divided condition can exist without its balancing mate, even when the senses record only one side of the interchange.

At the human level, rhythmic balanced interchange becomes the ethical law of equal giving for regiving. A completed interchange returns to balance. An incomplete interchange leaves a residue of unbalance experienced as tension.

Life and Death Are Two Directions of One Interchange

In the Russell Cosmogeny, Life does not begin with the appearance of a body, nor does it end when that body disappears. Life belongs to Mind.

What the senses call life and death are two opposed directions of thought-wave motion within one continuous wave cycle.

Concentrative thinking compresses motion into visible form. It winds the wave into increasing density, pressure, heat and appearance. This generative direction is conventionally called life.

Decentrative thinking unwinds compressed motion. It expands, cools, discharges and returns visible bodies toward the invisibility from which they appeared. This radiative direction is conventionally called death.

The terms life and death therefore indicate preponderant directions within the wave cycle, not two separate realities. Each is born with its balancing mate, and each sequentially becomes the other. Concentration gives to decentration, and decentration regives the conditions necessary for renewed concentration.

Bodies appear, mature, disappear and reappear in changing patterns. The Idea expressed through them remains eternally complete in Mind.

There is no death of Life because Life never entered the moving body. The body is its patterned record.

The Cube-Sphere: The One Form of the Divided Universe

Walter and Lao Russell reduce the apparent complexity of material Creation to one basic divided form: the cube-sphere.

The sphere is the visible, compressed half of the polarized body. It is formed through the concentrative pulsation of Mind-thinking, which compresses from without toward a still center of gravity.

The cube is the invisible, expanded half. It is associated with the decentrative pulsation that extends from within toward the still boundary planes of the wave-field.

Together, the cube and sphere provide the fundamental geometry through which bodies are made and unmade:

the sphere records compression, generation and visibility;
the cube records expansion, radiation and invisibility;
the still center and still boundary planes maintain the balance of the wave-field.

Across the nine-octave formulation described in the Home Study Course, bodies repeatedly concentrate from zero toward maximum compression and decentrate from compression toward zero.

The cube and sphere are not God, nor is either one the Absolute State of Mind. They are conditioned geometric effects within the electric universe. Still Magnetic Light centers and controls their patterned interchange but is not itself a geometric body.

Mind Knows; the Body Senses

The Russell Cosmogeny makes a foundational distinction between Mind-knowing and body-sensing.

“Matter is electric and can only sense things.”

The brain and nervous system receive, transmit and record electrical sensations. They record pressure, resistance, temperature, pain, movement, sequence and change. These sensory records allow a body to respond to and manifest balance with other bodies, but sensation is not knowledge.

Mind alone knows and thinks.

The senses encounter Creation sequentially. They record one position, condition or event after another and construct the appearance of motion through those changing relations. They cannot know the simultaneous balance of the whole cycle.

Mind knows that whole balance without needing to sense every divided effect separately.

This distinction became indispensable to my understanding of the State in the fire.

The State in the Fire and Severance From Sensing

The extrasensory flashes that preceded the State in the fire disclosed effects of creating. They belonged to the threshold between sensing and knowing, where ordered relations of effect became perceptible beyond the ordinary sensory range.

The State itself was different.

It was not a vision of cube-spheres, spirals, wave-fields or moving bodies. I do not identify the State with any particular geometry or conditioned effect. When the State occurred, sensing had been severed.

What remained was wholly qualitative Knowing of ecstatic Self-communion of the one whole Idea.

When I later read Walter and Lao Russell’s descriptions of severance from body-sensing, timeless knowing and the ecstasy of the God-Mind, I found a vocabulary that corresponded with the structure of my experience .

The Home Study Course defines ecstasy as the one undivided emotion:

“Ecstasy is the one undivided emotion — the balanced ecstasy of love for which there are no opposites.”

This is the closest Russellian description I have found for what I called Love, Being Love and Absolute Satiation.

When I describe the State as wholly dynamic, I am not describing sensed motion. I mean that the living relation of giving and regiving was known all at once, without sequence, division or opposition. It was the qualitative ecstasy of rhythmic balanced interchange known from its still Source.

I was not observing two opposing waves and reasoning that they must be balanced. I knew the balance itself.

The effects of creating had been flashed before me. Then the sensory means by which effects are ordinarily divided into sequences ceased, leaving only the indivisible qualitative Reality from which their relations extend.

Why the Russell Cosmogeny Matters to Me

I discovered the Russell Cosmogeny seven years after the Sate in the fire. The works of Walter and Lao Russell did not cause the State in the fire, nor do I offer the State as empirical proof of every scientific proposition they advanced.

Their cosmogeny gave me a precise language through which I could distinguish what had been sensed, what had been extrasensorily perceived and what had been qualitatively known beyond sensing.

It allowed me to distinguish:

Mind from matter;
Cause from effect;
Knowing from sensing;
Stillness from motion;
Life from the appearance of a living body;
and the Absolute State from the geometry through which divided effects are manifested.

The body is the lawful record of effects. Through its sensations, it records the balanced or unbalanced consequences of balanced or unbalanced thinking. But the body is not the Knower, and its birth and death do not determine the beginning or ending of Life.

To live without the idea of death is not to deny that bodies dissolve. It is to cease identifying eternal Life with the body that temporarily records it.

The State in the fire did not give me “a new belief about God”. It relieved the sensory conditions through which I had mistaken moving effects for Life itself.

The Russell Cosmogeny later gave me the language to say what had been known without words:

Mind is Cause. Love is the Law. Creation is One. Every divided effect is eternally balanced in the still Light from which it appears.

Source note: Russellian terminology and quotations on this page are drawn from Walter and Lao Russell’s Home Study Course on Universal Law, Natural Science and Living Philosophy. Reflections concerning the State in the fire are my own.