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         MindNet Journal - Vol. 1, No. 88B * [Part 2 of 2 parts]
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         V E R I C O M M sm                 "Quid veritas est?"
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    [Continued from part 1]

    WALTER RUSSEL ARTICLE: SIDEBARS

    An Early Warning
         August, 1954. "It will not take many years to utterly
    destroy the... encircling protective walls which surround this
    planet and protect the earth from burning up by the sun's hot
    rays," Walter and Lao Russell, Newsletter of the University of
    Science and Philosophy.
         April 6, 1989. "Scientists reported yesterday that for the
    first time they have detected an increase in "biologically
    relevant" levels of ultraviolet radiation reaching the ground as
    a result of the ozone hole over the Antarctica. This is the first
    indication that the depletion of ozone... is beginning to cause
    the potentially harmful effect that has long been predicted."
    (Washington Post)

    A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma
         In a way, the abrupt emergence of Russell's astonishing
    hypothesis is in keeping with the peculiar tradition of the
    ozone story, a tale rife with riddles and ironies. "One of the
    most striking features of the ozone controversy [is] the extent
    to which 'outsiders' played a crucial role in identifying the
    threats to the ozone layer." (The Ozone War, page 11.)
         It was James Lovelock, now famous as the author of the
    controversial Gaia Hypothesis, who first found CFCs persisting in
    the stratosphere. Making the historic measurement required an
    ultra-sensitive device. Unable to obtain any funding for the
    research (he was dismissed as a "crank"), Lovelock built the
    delicate tool himself, using his family's "grocery money."
         Ironically, Lovelock thought the chemicals might serve as
    useful "tracers" for atmospheric study, and said they posed "no
    conceivable hazard." "I bombed," Lovelock frankly admits. "It
    turned out I was sitting on a time bomb."  (The Ozone War, page
    9.)
         Sherry Rowland, who while on a "fishing trip for new ideas"
    happened to hear early rumor of Lovelock's measurements at a
    conference coffee klatch, was no more a part of mainstream ozone
    research than Lovelock. In fact, he was not an atmospheric
    scientist at all, but a chemist specializing in, of all things,
    the chemistry of radio-isotopes. He and Molina, a young research
    assistant fresh from receiving his PhD, never imagined that their
    study would plunge them into the eye of a national cyclone of
    controversy.
         If Russell is right, and manmade nuclear reactions prove to
    be at the root of stratospheric ills, then Sherry Rowland's
    involvement provides one further irony: prior to his becoming
    interested in the fluorocarbon work that led to the ozone
    finding, he was funded by the Atomic Energy Commission. His area
    of research? -- the chemistry of atoms produced in nuclear
    reactions.

    Russell the Artist
         The story of how Dr. Russell came to sculpt his famous bust
    of Edison is an example of his legendary versatility. At the age
    of fifty-six, Russell had been an accomplished painter, but had
    never handled clay in his life. As President of the Society of
    Arts and Sciences, he felt compelled to make good on a commission
    for the bust, which a fellow artist had accepted but was unable
    to complete. He promptly got some clay and wired Mrs. Edison that
    he would go and do it himself -- akin to a great conductor
    suddenly picking up the violin for an unrehearsed recital.
         "It was a very unwise thing to do, perhaps, because with
    such a great man as Edison as my subject, I might not have
    survived a failure," he later remarked. "But I never let the
    thought of failure enter my mind... The inspired belief that I
    should do this thing as a demonstration of my belief in man's
    unlimited power made me ignore the difficulties that lay in the
    way. So I went to Florida with a mass of clay, but on my way
    down, I spent the entire time absorbed in inspirational
    meditation with the Universal Source of all inspiration."
         The resulting sculpture was to be one of the great mileposts
    in his career; other commissions followed immediately, producing
    busts of Franklin Roosevelt, General Douglas MacArthur, Thomas
    Watson, George Gershwin and Leopold Stokowski, and finally a
    twenty-eight figure monument to Mark Twain and the famous "Four
    Freedoms.

    Russell the Social Reformer
         Founded 20 years earlier as an "ethical and moral movement
    to bring culture, character and the Brotherhood of Man principle
    into world human relations," the New York-based Twilight Club
    brought together a network of such luminaries as Ralph Waldo
    Emerson, Mark Twain, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Walt Whitman, Edwin
    Markham and Alexis Carrell. (Alexis Carrell wrote Man The Unknown
    -- a perennial favorite in macrobiotic circles -- during his
    association with Russell and the Twilight Club.)
         Russell's long collaboration with Thomas Watson, another
    Twilight Club member and the founder of IBM, led to the
    introduction of moral standards and ethical principles in the
    world of business. In his first of many meetings and lectures for
    IBM personnel, Russell said he was "shocked" with the "jungle
    philosophy of every man for himself" that then permeated the
    business world, and he effectively replaced the philosophy of
    "business is business" with the concept "that equal interchange
    of goods and services between buyer and seller is the keynote of
    tomorrow's business world." (The Man Who Tapped the Secrets of
    the Universe, p. 24-25.)
         During the Depression years when so many businesses failed,
    IBM continued to thrive. When asked the secret of their success,
    Watson replied, "Go talk with Walter Russell."
         Abandoned during the WWII years, the Twilight Club was later
    revived as the University of Science and Philosophy at Swannanoa,
    Virginia. After Russell's passing in 1963, his work was carried
    on at Swannanoa by Lao Russell, his co-equal partner in work as
    in marriage.

    A Living and Dying Universe
         Walter Russell often asserted that God's universe "is a
    two-way, not one-way universe." The death force or "winding
    down" principle is familiar to us as the force of entropy, the
    famed Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Law of Entropy states
    that all systems gradually lose energy (that is, energy becomes
    less organized and therefore unavailable to perform work) through
    dispersal of heat; hence, the universe is destined to die a "heat
    death."
         Russell disagreed, and detailed the mechanics of an
    opposite, balancing force -- the life-organizing force, which he
    also termed "generoactive." This force is the answer to the
    riddle of Newton's apple, to which Russell alludes in his 1930s
    Times letter. (Years later, Buckminster Fuller coined the term
    "syntropy" to describe entropy's complement.) Russell also
    likened these twin forces to the charging and discharging of a
    battery, or the winding and unwinding of a spring.
         How rapidly or gradually a system unwinds after reaching
    maturity depends on a variety of factors, principally its degree
    of balance within its local environment. Thus the relaxation and
    dissolution of life may occur as slow fermentation, decay, a
    burst of flame or an explosion.
         "We do not say that a decaying tree, which takes fifty years
    to go back into the ground, is exploding. If you burn it,
    however, the flame is a series of quick explosions which will do
    in two hours what Nature intended should take fifty years."
    (Atomic Suicide?, page 23.)
         Central to Russell's scientific conclusions is this
    observation: the state of rest, the source from which all life
    arises and to which it ultimately returns, is the "normal" state
    (to which Russell often refers as God, Mind or Magnetic zero.)
    In other words, it takes increasing effort to "wind up" into
    greater density (to live), while it takes literally no effort at
    all, once a system reaches maximum compression, to unwind again
    -- to die. Most significantly, the force of the unwinding/death
    phase is proportionate to the total effort expended in winding up
    to that point.
         For example, it may take many years of consuming steak and
    ice cream, perhaps along with exposure to chemical contaminants,
    to reach the condition disposing one to bowel cancer. The effort
    expended by the individual, the food industry, the chemical
    factories and even the cattle involved, are considerable; at the
    point of maximum compression (when the body cannot hold itself
    together any tighter) that mass of effort reverts into a
    forceful, effortless unwinding. What goes in, must come back out.
         To arrest the course of the disease at this point requires a
    tremendous, renewed exertion of compression and life effort,
    commonly observed as the "will to live" factor or, in macrobiotic
    thought, as the capacity to self-reflect and change one's
    personal habits.
         In the case of human illness and dying, such a reversal
    through renewed compression is often possible, just as it is
    possible to arrest the burning of a tree with cold water, or to
    slow fermentation with salt. It is not so easy to halt the
    unwinding process of gunpowder, an electrical short-circuit --
    or the decay of radioactivity.

    The Spiral of Elements
         As in the life of his contemporary Georges Ohsawa, the
    modern founder of the macrobiotic movement, Russell was absorbed
    in his later years with both the cosmic meaning and the immediate
    dangers of atomic science. Also like his Oriental counterpart,
    Russell vividly and brilliantly expressed his grasp of universal
    dynamics in a spiral chart of the elements.
         Russell's atomic charts placed all the atoms as points along
    a continuous spectrum of increasing compression, much like the
    notes of an ascending musical scale. The musical simile is not
    casual: Russell's atomic scale is harmonically organized in
    octaves, with the inert gases (helium, neon, argon etc.) acting
    as the "keynote" of each octave. (Not surprisingly, Dr. Russell
    was also an accomplished composer.)
         Russell held that the hydrogen octave, far from being the
    beginning of the atomic scale, was in fact preceded by three
    "inaudible" atomic octaves, yielding a full spectrum of nine
    octaves. These first three octaves, involving wavelengths too
    vast to measure, would be beyond the threshold of physical
    sensing (that is, beyond detection by normal instruments of
    science). It was the lack of this knowledge, Russell contended,
    and the misconception of hydrogen as the first element that
    forced scientists to view deuterium and tritium (which he had
    originally called Ethlogen and Bebegen -- now well-known as
    components of the "heavy water" used in today's nuclear
    reactions) as isotopes of hydrogen instead of true tonal elements
    in their own right. ("Isotopes" might be compared to the
    "accidentals" -- sharps and flats -- of single musical notes.)
    On the other hand, he asserted, that many of the higher octave
    "elements" in fact are but isotopes of higher-octave versions of
    carbon.
         Carbon, lying in the center of the fourth octave, is held to
    be the balance point of perfect stability and the mature
    expression of the entire spectrum, and as such serves as the
    basis for organic life. Russell pointed out that roughly 98
    percent of organic life forms are composed of carbon and four
    other elements (hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and silicon) which all
    are grouped together with carbon in the fourth octave (except
    silicon, a transmutation of carbon in the next octave up, which
    forms the basis of the Earth's crust and of soil). In a sense,
    the "purpose" of the entire atomic spectrum is to create carbon
    life forms.
         The further one compresses past carbon, the more readily
    will the pressure and heat of compression explode into decay.
    The supercompressed elements of the 7th, 8th and especially 9th
    octaves (radium, plutonium, etc.) are simmering at the breaking
    point -- hence the tremendously explosive pressures of the
    radioactive metals.

    Encountering the Russells
         On a quiet afternoon in 1979, I sat in a coffee shop
    preparing my Kushi Institute lecture for that evening. As I
    sipped my coffee -- I was allowed to, after all, I was a teacher
    -- I was interrupted by two friends, both "senior" teachers.
    (This particular coffee shop served as a hangout and meeting
    place for macrobiotic teachers.) They joined me and began
    discussing the usual topic of the day: How to get everyone else
    to eat macrobiotically so as to establish one peaceful world.
    One of the seniors noticed my recently acquired book, Dr. Walter
    Russell's The Secret of Light, lying on the table beside me; and
    they asked me who Dr. Russell was and what the book was about.
    After the first few sentences of my reply, they both proceeded to
    criticize both the book and its author for a good half hour.
         In the Boston macrobiotic community where I lived at that
    time, I soon learned, to mention the Russells and their work was
    like admitting that you did not understand the unique principle
    of macrobiotics. The philosophical and scientific works of the
    Russells were (and perhaps still are) considered unclear,
    confusing and impractical. I, like my fellow students and
    teachers, certainly did not want confusing or "foreign"
    philosophical ideas to disrupt our established belief system
    concerning the nature of macrobiotics. As far as we were
    concerned, the macrobiotic truth existed here, and only here, in
    our little community. The sun flag was raised high, and I was
    dedicated, loyal, stubborn and very confused. So, I laid the
    Russells' work aside, along with all else that did not fit into
    my small world of dogma.
         Several years later, being a little older, not necessarily a
    little wiser, but a whole lot more curious and frustrated with
    apparent inconsistencies and impracticalities in my own
    understanding of macrobiotics, I secretly began to explore the
    works of Dr. and Mrs. Russell. At first I became more confused
    and found myself resisting, especially when I read such bold
    statements as, "Opposites do not attract," or "Like attracts
    like." Wait a minute, I thought. Maybe my macrobiotic friends
    were right about Russell -- there do seem to be inconsistencies
    here. I soon discovered that the inconsistencies I was
    encountering were not in their works, but in the limitations of
    my own prior understanding. Gradually a new comprehension began
    to open up.
         Their words penetrated deep into my soul. They were honest
    words, words of wisdom, of love, and they were steeped in the
    unifying principle of macrobiotics. Their expression was
    extremely clear and to the point. The message was practical and
    not at all confusing. There was nothing there to instill guilt or
    fear.
         They spoke of the difference between knowing and thinking,
    and how we all know all there is to know, yet do not always admit
    it to ourselves. Dr. Russell was a perfect example of one who
    knew. He had very little formal education, and used this to his
    advantage. Through inspiration he became an accomplished
    scientist, philosopher, artist, sculptor and musician.
         They spoke of how we as human beings can reinspire others,
    yet can only be inspired by the One. And most of all, for me,
    they explained the mechanism and process of the logarithmic
    spiral -- the foundation of macrobiotics. The more I absorbed
    their understanding, the more it seemed to add to rather than
    detract from or conflict with my prior macrobiotic learning.
         Through the years that followed I began to incorporate their
    understanding of macrobiotics into my own teaching and
    counselling, always with the thought that I would meet Mrs.
    Russell some day. For the past eight years I traveled throughout
    the United States, teaching and encouraging people to study the
    Russells' works, and giving out the address of the University of
    Science and Philosophy. During this period I had not once
    contacted the University to introduce myself. Why? I have no
    idea. In 1987 I moved to Charlottesville, Virginia from New York.
    Why? I have no idea, other than it seemed to be the proper move
    for me. I soon learned that the University of Science and
    Philosophy was only a twenty minute drive away.
         I called the University and introduced myself, and said I
    would like to meet Mrs. Russell; I was given an appointment.
    Days later, I drove out to Swannanoa with John Mann, who had
    recently relocated Solstice from upstate New York to
    Charlottesville. [Editor's Note: Why had we abruptly relocated?
    We had no idea.] Arriving at the requested time, I introduced
    myself to the staff and they said they would inform Mrs. Russell
    that I was there. I stood among a group of approximately twenty
    other visitors and watched as the most elegant lady I have ever
    met began to descend the carpeted stairs.
         We had never met, yet she recognized me in the crowd
    immediately, and invited me upstairs. As we sat, she proceeded to
    tell me my life story in detail, from the beginning to the
    present. She spoke as if she knew me when I was a child. She did!
    And that wasn't all she knew -- for she, too, was a living
    example of her and her late husband's philosophy.
         We spoke for a few hours on many subjects. She told humorous
    stories about Dr. Russell and herself as if he were still alive.
    "He is!" she said, "You can never die!" She spoke with a simple,
    quiet conviction that was utterly disarming, and I felt as if I
    were in the presence of honesty incarnate. Meeting Mrs. Russell
    was an experience I will cherish forever.

         -- Steve Gagna

         Editor's Note: Mrs. Russell was a perceptive person. Early
    in our conversation, she looked straight at us again and said,
    "This started in 1954." She was referring to the '54 University
    Newsletter, no doubt; but she spoke so emphatically, Steve and I
    could not help glancing at each other -- could she have known
    that we were both born in 1954? She smiled. Later, she abruptly
    turned to us and nonchalantly commented, "You know, Dr. Russell
    never smoked cigarettes or drank coffee." Bingo, I thought.

         -- Ed.

    RESOURCES:

    "Atomic Suicide?" (1957, 304 pp.), discusses the nature
    of matter and its relation to the world of spirit. It also
    provides a broad introduction to Russell's general cosmology. One
    fascinating section is devoted to excerpts from the contemporary
    popular media about the dangers of nuclear power. A lengthy
    introduction by Lao Russell includes a biographical essay on
    Russell's life. (Solstice Library)

    "The Secret of Light" (1947, 288 pp.) is a thorough exposition of
    Russell's cosmology, more completely and systematically presented
    than in Atomic Suicide? (Solstice Library)

    "The Man Who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe," by Glenn Clark
    (1953 edition, 57 pp.), is a short, highly accessible biography.
    (Solstice Library)

    "Home Study Course." Available from the University, this is a
    thorough, comprehensive course of study of the Russells' work in
    all its dimensions. (See ad this page for the Home Study Course
    and other Russell books.)

    RELATED BOOKS AND LITERATURE

    "Holoscene" (formerly "Spiral, Lord of Creation"), by Jerry
    Canty; 144 pp. Canty's most thorough explanation of Russell's
    work to date. Available directly from Canty in photocopy for $25
    ppd. Jerome Canty, Box 5256, Chico CA 95927.

    "The Atomic Age and The Unique Principle," Georges Ohsawa.
    Written towards the end of his life, The Atomic Age presents
    Ohsawa's most incisive perspective on the atomic frontier and the
    20th century challenge. (Solstice Library)

    "World Crisis Solutions Foundation Newsletter," issues 1-4.
    Written by Dr. Tim Binder, these four newsletters contain brief
    overviews of some of Dr. Russell's insights and Dr. Binder's
    efforts to pursue the radiation/ozone-depletion connection. The
    Newsletters also contain condensed articles on a variety of other
    vital health and environmental issues. $20 for set of four. NW
    169 Blodgett Camp Road, Hamilton MT 59840 (406) 363-4041.

    "The Ozone War," Lydia Dotto and Harold Schiff, Doubleday & Co.,
    1978. A fascinating account of the discoveries and controversies
    surrounding Sherwood Rowland's work with the Ozone Hole.

    "Protecting the Ozone Layer," Chapter 5 of The State of the World
    1989, Worldwatch Institute, NY.

    [END]
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    Appendix A.
    -----------

    PROJECT ARGUS: UNITED STATES NUCLEAR DETONATIONS IN SPACE

    Around 1958, the significant implications of the Earth's magnetic
    fields and radiation belts for future military activities were
    what drew the attention of government physicists. Nicholas
    Christofilos, a physicist working at the University of
    California's Livermore Radiation Laboratory, developed
    techniques to harness and control the energy released in hydrogen
    fusion reactions. Christofilos used magnetic confinement fields.
    When the Soviets launched Sputnik I, Christofilos decided that
    the earth's magnetic field could be used to contain an
    artificial band of relativistic electrons. He speculated that
    this artificial radiation belt could be made intense enough to
    destroy satellites in orbit. The belt would produce worldwide
    radio noise on the HF and VHF radio bands that carried the bulk
    of military communications. By accurately calculating the site
    for an explosion of a nuclear device, it's effects could be made
    to occur over a specific target area. Christofilos urged that
    the government test his postulates by exploding a nuclear device
    in space. Christofilos superiors at Livermore placed his papers
    under top security control and advised the President's Science
    Advisory group of the matter. The resulting program became:

    PROJECT ARGUS

    PROJECT ARGUS TESTS

    Explosion    Locale         Date            Yield   Altitude
    ----------------------------------------------------------------

    Argus I    South Atlantic   Aug 27, 1958    1KT     200KM

    Argus II   South Atlantic   Aug 30, 1958    1KT     250KM

    Argus III  South Atlantic   Sept 6, 1958    1KT     500KM

    POST-ARGUS TESTING ACTIONS
    --------------------------

    Starfish   Johnston Island  July, 9 1962  1.4KT     400KM

    SOVIET NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS IN SPACE
    ----------------------------------

    USSR       Siberia          Oct 22, 1962  200KT     UNK

    USSR       Siberia          Oct 28, 1962  800KT     UNK

    USSR       Siberia          Nov 1,  1962   1+MT     UNK

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