06-12-2018, 10:41 AM
Throughout his life, Tesla showed severe signs of a psychosis and may be one of the finest examples of the thesis that genius and lunacy are different sides of the same coin. He had problems throughout his entire life to integrate in groups of others and had a strong leaning towards the occult and metaphysical. One of the best examples for this would be the famous "Columbia Lecture" in which he tried to lecture people about electricity with the aid of , blatantly put, stage magic and the occult-esque.
His obsessions dictated him throughout his entire life, but after 1900, things became much more severe than his already existing OCD that forced him to "calculate the volume of soup dishes and coffee mugs or else, my food would be disgusting to me". His already dominant leaning towards transcendentalism and metaphysics accelerated . He had "a strong aversion against pearls and earrings, was heavily repulsed by other people´s hair and felt "hot" when seeing a peach. He counted his every step....later in life, he even tried to self medicate by applying electroshock therapy to himself and temporarily became a heavy drinker. One final quote of Tesla that may ring some alarm bells in those among us who are experienced with psychedelics: "In some cases, the air around me was filled with living, flaming tongues...."
In the light of all this, I´d say that Tesla surely was a genius in regards of electricity ,he invented lots of stuff and held up to 112 patents. But in everything else, one can only come to the conclusion that tesla was suffering from a massive psychosis throughout his life. The proverbial lonatic prodigy. In exactly that sense, I´d assume his quote about the pidgeon , (that I couldn´t find in most of the articles dealing with him,btw) is a result of his nature as a "lone wolf", paired with his leaning towards the occult and "life energy". Nothing "zoo" for me in this. Nietzsche, btw, is said to broke out in tears when he saw the driver of a coach hitting the horse pulling it...so much he went over and hugged the horse. Nietzsche suffered from the first mild signs of syphilis when this happened...
