Nikola Tesla and the Multiverse
Learn about Nikolas Tesla's revolutionary method to which he credits most of his inventions - and how you can do the same
This article is an adapted excerpt from my upcoming book “Multiverse Therapy - Discover Infinity”
Table of Contents
1. Metaverse Hype
2. Tesla’s Way of Invention
3. Coaching A Genius
4. How Google was invented in a Dream
5. Einstein’s thought-experiments
6. Happy Little Accidents
7. The Technique in a Podcast
Metaverse Hype
Maybe you’ve heard of a thing called the metaverse. It’s like a 3D version of the internet. Instead of you sitting in front of a screen, you’ve jumped into the screen and explore from the inside. Nowadays it happens with the help of weird and ugly glasses, some people of the future might be so “smart” as to get a direct brain implant (microchip) to connect with machines and the internet.
In the metaverse you can walk along a road and houses, or towers. These houses could be someone’s website, social media profile or an actual store, selling you goods. Forerunners like Gucci already sell digital items, which you can clothe your avatar* with.
*An avatar is a virtual representation of you and your body, with which you walk through and explore this digital world, the metaverse.
In the hope that, once salivating from seeing a Gucci bag dangling from your avatar, your desire buttons get pushed so hard that you can’t help yourself and you just have to buy the real bag, to get that temporary injection of feel good emotions! Modern digital marketing…
Alas, fashion moguls are not the only ones going digital, also industrial titan Siemens and former graphics now AI gurus NVIDIA set out to explore that novel world. They teamed up, Siemens x NVIDIA, and created the “industrial metaverse.” In it, companies can create “digital twins” of factories and individual machines. Their promise is that it helps them to detect problems, minimize downtimes, prototype better, produce faster and so on. Wonderful!
Tesla’s Way of Invention
A man born and bred to the so-called exact sciences, and at the height of his ability to reason empirically, finds it hard to accept that an exact sensory imagination might also exist. —GOETHE
Nikola Tesla, famous for revolutionizing how we use electricity (Alternative Current AC), inventing the induction motor and predicting the internet and smartphones in the 1900s, has been doing all of what the “industrial metaverse” promises since the 1880s. He claims his imagination, his self-applied Multiverse Therapy, as the basis of all his breakthroughs:
I took courage and began to think intently of the problem, trying to visualize the kind of machine I wanted to build, constructing all its parts in my Imagination (…) Then, one afternoon I was walking with a friend in the City Park and reciting poetry. At that time I knew entire books by heart, word for word. One of these was Goethe's “Faust,” and the setting sun reminded me of the passage:
The glow retreats, done is the day of toil;
It yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring;
Ah, that no wing can lift me from the soil,
Upon its track to follow, follow soaring!
Even while I was speaking these glorious words, the vision of my induction motor, complete, perfect, operable, came into my mind like a flash. I drew with a stick on the sand the vision I had seen. They were the same diagrams I was to show six years later before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.
This was Tesla’s first breakthrough in his magical, multiversal technique of invention. It took him several years, but after that he seemed to have figured out how to do it and how to get great joy out of it:
For a while I gave myself up entirely to the intense enjoyment of picturing machines and devising new forms. It was a mental state of happiness about as complete as I have ever known in life. Ideas came in an uninterrupted stream and the only difficulty I had was to hold them fast. The pieces of apparatus I conceived were to me absolutely real and tangible in every detail, even to the minute marks and signs of wear. I delighted in imagining the motors constantly running, for in this way they presented to mind's eye a more fascinating sight. When natural inclination develops into a passionate desire, one advances towards his goal in seven-league boots. In less than two months I evolved virtually all the types of motors and modifications of the system which are now identified with my name.
But, was Tesla born with this gift of creating fully functional machines in his imagination, and it is unreasonable to think anyone else could ever learn it? Far from it.
10 years old Nikola was plagued by scenes from his day, like being at a funeral, appearing in front of his eyes. He could even poke his finger into these images and they would persist. His first remedy was to visualize comforting objects and scenes from his memory. He would go over everything from his mental memory bank, but after two or three rounds the soothing effect would lessen. The law of diminishing returns, going over the same images again and again, until they become lame, in full swing. This is what Tesla did to invent himself out of his malady:
I began to take mental excursions beyond the small world of my actual knowledge. Day and night, in imagination, I went on journeys — saw new places, cities, countries, and all the time I tried very hard to make these imaginary things very sharp and clear in my mind. I imagined myself living in countries I never had seen, and I made imaginary friends, who were very dear to me and really seemed alive.
As you can see, Tesla was not naturally gifted with exploring the multiverse in high resolution and to its furthest corners, but he worked at it day and night and he focused on making these things “very sharp and clear” in his mind. This is what the tools and principles revealed to you throughout this book will help you with. And, was Tesla’s method a hit and miss which only sometimes seemed to work? This is what he has to say:
In my mind, I change the construction, make improvements, and even operate the device. Without ever having drawn a sketch, I can give the measurements of all parts to workmen, and when completed these parts will fit, just as certainly as though I had made accurate drawings. It is immaterial to me whether I run my machine in my mind or test it in my shop.
The inventions I have conceived in this way, have always worked. In thirty years there has not been a single exception. My first electric motor, the vacuum tube wireless light, my turbine engine, and many other devices have all been developed in exactly this way.
Coaching a Genius
Although Tesla got into his method of mental, multiversal invention after several years, most people cannot afford that long of a time to get going. In this book I’ve given you the tools to speed the process up. If I’ve had the chance to coach Tesla and do a Multiverse Therapy with him, these are some of the things I would have done.
From his autobiography we learn that for Tesla, the invention of the induction motor was a matter of life and death, he worked at it many hours per day, straining himself. As he felt close to his final breakthrough, he fell sick for six months, unable to work. When he was healthy again we saw in a quote before, that his breakthrough came while walking in a park with a friend and reciting poetry. These bits of information alone help us to work with him on quite some things.
First of all I’d help him to bring the perceived urgency of his problem down. Would he really really die without solving that issue, no matter what? I don’t think so. If yes, we could take a trip with him into his afterlife, look at his regrets and other pressing emotions and thus take some of the pressure off his mind. His obsession, his inability to let something rest, de-focus and come back later at it in a more relaxed state is what made him sick for months. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure his intensity is what helped him to get to the top of his game, but you need to be able to switch gears, chill and also focus on other things. This shift in perspective is what a coach can help you with. Or life.
We see how his Eureka moment came when he was in the park, with a friend, reciting poetry. Did Tesla ever fully understand that vital connection between intense focus and changing focus to something else, thereby giving space to breakthroughs and not messing himself up?
Maybe yes, maybe no, but that’s how it played out for him:
I sink into a nearly lethargic state which lasts half an hour to the minute. Upon awakening I have the sensation as though the events immediately preceding (his project) had occurred very long ago, and if I attempt to continue the interrupted train of thought I feel a veritable mental nausea. Involuntarily I then turn to other work and am surprised at the freshness of the mind and ease with which I overcome obstacles that had baffled me before. After weeks or months my passion for the temporarily abandoned invention returns and I invariably find answers to all the vexing questions with scarcely any effort.
Apart from these real-life coachings, what could be done in Multiverse Journeys to help speed up the process of discovery and perfection?
A Multiverse Journey happens with two people: one being the guide, in this case me, and the other the person having the journey, in this case Tesla. We would find a topic of interest for Tesla and then I’d ask him to close his eyes.
When he thinks of the topic, does any scene come up?
And if a scene, or even just a vague image, does come up, I ask many many details about it.
Who is in it?
Any shades in the colors?
Are there any surroundings?
How is the emotional atmosphere in the scene?
On and on. And by describing these details to me, the scene becomes more clear to him, his power of imagination grows. And then usually the scene doesn’t stay static, but comes to life. New people or objects show up and I ask for more details. Thus a whole story is created, leading to new insights that you wouldn’t reach otherwise.
I’m going here by intuition only, since I don’t remember having access to the precise happenings in Tesla’s mind. That said, I’d help him to get back the sense of wonder, excitement, exploration and novelty that he had in his early years of Multiverse Journeys. The time he made new friends and visited far away places in his inner world. So I’d just do several sessions focused on exploring different places, meeting people and engaging as many senses as possible. Getting him away from his one-dimensional goal-oriented quest. But I wouldn’t shy away from going deep with him on a specific invention either. Let’s take an engine as an example.
“Nikola, please describe this engine, your current version of it, in as much detail as possible.”
“How would you name it? Give me five names for it.”
“Build it purely out of gold or other materials like silver, copper etc.”
If someone now screams, “but this doesn’t make any sense,” I unfortunately have to inform you that you didn’t understand anything of this book. Because I could even ask him to imagine the engine be made from rainbow, pure electricity, good thoughts, bad thoughts or memories from a far better future. And we would just see what his imagination, prompted like this, would come up with and take it from there.
Do you think it’s possible that things you haven’t considered before pop up when questioned for long enough along these lines? A real human imagination can work with questions like that, in contrast to AIs and people who’ve taught themselves to think like machines only. They can’t compute this. Programming error.
“Nikola, can you grow legs or stilts for your engine and send it, dressed with clothes, on a sightseeing tour in ancient Rome? Or a safari in Africa? And what are some of the comments people make when encountering it?”
“What are other machines that yours envies or likes? Which would it like to work with and what does it dream about at night? And what does it think of you, actually?”
This is how you could work with a genius whose imagination is running on all cylinders. Other people might benefit from a less “far out” approach.
How Google was invented in a Dream
As we are speaking of real-world breakthroughs facilitated from a place beyond our everyday physical reality… did you know that…
…the Sewing Machine, the Periodic Table of Elements and a company named Google were all inspired via dreams?
This is what Larry Page, co-founder of Google, had to say about the power of dreams and their real-life consequences:
You know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know how, if you don’t have a pencil and pad by the bed to write it down, it will be completely gone the next morning? Well, I had one of those dreams when I was 23. When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking: what if we could download the whole web, and just keep the links and… I grabbed a pen and started writing! Sometimes it is important to wake up and stop dreaming. I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work(…) Amazingly, I had no thought of building a search engine. The idea wasn’t even on the radar. But, much later we happened upon a better way of ranking webpages to make a really great search engine, and Google was born. When a really great dream shows up, grab it!
Our history is filled with examples of powerful nightly dreams changing its course.
For more examples, you might want to check out this book, The Secret History of Dreams.
Einstein’s Thought Experiments
Instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We undoubtedly have in our brains some finer fibers which enable us to perceive truths which we could not attain through logical deductions, and which it would be futile to attempt to achieve through any wilful effort of thinking.
- Nikola Tesla
There are also stories of Albert Einstein using inspiration from the dream state to come up with his Theory of Relativity. One version accredits a dream about cows, viewed from different perspectives, to have brought the great breakthrough. Another versions says it was a dream in which he sled down a mountain, accelerating to the speed of light, at which moment the stars changed shape.
Whatever might be the true version, Einstein not only tapped into his imagination via the dream state, he also loved to do so called “Gedankenexperimente” (German for “thought experiments”). And more. Before his fame, Einstein worked at the Swiss patent office. Every day, he would attempt to visualize how an invention and its underlying theoretical premises would play out in reality. This makes sense, as he went to a “Pestalozzi” school, whose founder Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi praised visualization as a tool of learning and knowledge.
Throughout history, Einstein was neither the first nor the last one to come up with “Gedankenexperimente,” one famous forerunner was Plato with his Allegory of the Cave. Thought experiments are a widely used tool with philosophers like Plato. They are also used in a quite modern context. Ethics and self-driving cars for example. Here it’s known as “the trolley problem.”
A self-driving car is about to hit a group of five people. It can evade the group, but then it would hit one other person. What should it do, hit one or five people? You can do your own experiments with that thought and change who these people are, for example: beggars, millionaires, criminals, children etc. Or some other variables.
In “Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung” (Sketches about the Psychology of Research), 19th-century physicist Ernst Mach writes that curiosity is a natural human quality. Babies are constantly experimenting and improvising, trying dozens of ways to walk, to move things from here to there without falling and so on. Mach writes:
“Our own ideas are more easily and readily at our disposal than physical facts. We experiment with thought, so as to say, at little expense. It shouldn’t surprise us that, oftentime, the thought experiment precedes the physical experiment and prepares the way for it… A thought experiment is also a necessary precondition for a physical experiment. Every inventor and every experimenter must have in his mind the detailed order before he actualizes it.”
For mental speculation to gain the scientific seal of approval (like studies that need to be double-blind, randomized etc.) and be called a proper thought experiment, there are several requirements:
The thought experiment’s assumptions need to be supported by empirical evidence.
The context must be believable, and it must provide useful answers to complex questions.
A thought experiment must have the potential to be falsified.
Two of Einstein’s best known thought experiments were him chasing a beam of light and a laser getting shot from the side into an upwards moving elevator. In the elevator it hits the other side slightly lower than the one it came from, thus proving to him that his theory of light getting bent by gravity was true.
Einstein seems to have been quite a character, actively using his imagination in different ways. He got inspiration from his dreams, he visualized patents play out in his life and he also used his imagination to come up with and conduct thought experiments.
One can also see that Einstein was not exactly mundane in his imagination, he seemed to wander quite “far out” at times.
Happy Little Accidents
Of course Nikola Tesla, as we have seen, was no stranger to thought experiments either. And as with so many things in his life, he tried to transcend the rules of the game and stretch our idea of what’s normal and the sensitive thing to do. When he was 18 he spent about a year on a mountain, evading the military draft. This gave him a lot of time and stillness to think, which led to his mind wandering quite far out. John J. O’Neill writes in his Tesla biography “Prodigal Genius” about this time:
One of the plans was for the construction and operation of an under-ocean tube, connecting Europe and the United States, by which mail could be transported in spherical containers moved through the tube by water pressure. He discovered early in his calculations that the friction of the water on the walls of the tube would require such a tremendous amount of power to overcome it that it made the project totally impracticable. Since, however, he was working on the project entirely for his own amusement, he eliminated friction from the calculations and was then able to design a very interesting system of high-speed intercontinental mail delivery. The factor which made this interesting project impracticable-the drag of the water on the sides of the tube-Tesla was later to utilize when he invented his novel steam turbine.
So he ran a proper thought experiment and applied all the variables known to him. He realized that due to the water pressure it wouldn’t work out, so the thought experiment failed. Which is a good thing, because part of the definition of a thought experiment is that it needs to be falsifiable. The experiment can’t all just work out magically. This wouldn’t be scientific and we would never make any progress, right?
Well, Tesla didn’t only want to play the stiff science game, he wanted to have fun with his imagination. So he chose to ignore the water pressure problem and just let his invention work out in his inner vision! He had fun with his imagination. What did his willful ignorance of the laws of this universe lead to? His underwater tube never became a reality, but from playing around with this idea he got something which he later could use for his steam turbine.
This reminds me of another fact of (scientific) life. Things not adhering to the rules, not playing out as planned, has led us to sensational discoveries. As always, there is more, but here is a small list of accidental discoveries:
Penicillin, X-rays, tea bags, LSD, post-its and the pacemaker.
I hope this gives you inspiration for your own experiments. Happy mental experimenting, happy imagining, happy far out venturing!
The Technique in a Podcast
Context of the interview:
In this podcast below I was interviewed by Josiah Brandt. Josiah’s channel is focused on how people can use their imagination to manifest things that they desire into their life. Yet another way how people use their imaginations.
I describe to him how people can use my technique, Multiverse Therapy (in the interview I didn’t use that name yet), to make their imaginations more real, more rich, more detailed. And this can be used by anyone who wants to work with their imagination, be it for invention, changing their life or manifesting something.
Thank you for reading so far, don’t be shy to get in touch or click on any of the buttons below!