Tomorrow is the fortieth anniversary of that day, the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin. I was sitting at my desk in my bachelor apartment in Prague. I had just put my farewell letter to my mother in the envelope and picked up the revolver, which lay in front of me, for I intended to set out on the journey across the Styx, to cast away a life that seemed shallow, worthless and with little promise of consolation in the future.
At that moment the ‘Pilot wearing the cloak of invisibility’, as I have since called him, boarded my ship of life and turned the helm. I heard a rustling at the door leading out into the hallway and when I turned round I saw something white being pushed under the door into the room. It was a printed brochure. The fact that I put my revolver down, picked up the brochure and read the title came neither from a feeling of curiosity nor from a secret desire to put off death — my heart was empty.
I read: ‘On Life after Death.’
‘Strange coincidence!’ was the thought that tried to form inside me, but it hardly managed to get the first word onto my lips. Since then I have never believed in coincidence, I believe in the Pilot.
With trembling hand — it had not trembled for a moment before, neither when I wrote the farewell letter to my mother, nor when I picked up the revolver — I lit the lamp, for night had fallen, and read the brochure, which had obviously been delivered by my bookseller’s messenger boy, from beginning to end, my pulse racing. It was all about spiritualism, above all describing the experiences the important scientists investigating this area — William Crookes, Professor Zöllner, Professor Fechner and others — had had with the mediums Slade, Eglinstone, Home etc.
I sat through the whole night until dawn started to break, with burning thoughts, which until then had been alien to me, going round and round inside my head; could such outstanding scholars as these have been mistaken? Hardly imaginable. But then what strange, incomprehensible laws of nature, flying in the face of all known principles of physics, had been at work?
In that night the ardent desire to see such things with my own eyes, touch them with my own hands, investigate their genuineness and understand the secrets that must lie behind them blazed up inside me to a scorching intensity which has remained with me ever since.
I took the gun — temporarily superfluous to requirement — and locked it in the drawer. I still have it: it has died of rust and the cylinder will not revolve, will never revolve again.
Then I went to bed and slept, a long, deep, dreamless sleep. Dreamless? Dreamless only in the sense that I saw no images or scenes I was involved in. But there are other, more profound experiences in deep sleep than dreaming in forms and figures; it is word and speech coming alive in some curious way when there is no mouth to speak apart from one’s own. It is a dialogue in which two separate persons speak and hear, and yet are one and the same. When we wake after such a dialogue, we have always forgotten the words themselves, but in the course of the day their meaning will appear in our consciousness in the form of thoughts that suddenly occur to us, behaving as if they had just emerged from the womb of our brain.
That day I woke with the feeling that someone in the room had just said something out loud; the next moment, however, it became clear to me that it was I myself who had spoken in my sleep and for a fraction of a second I caught my lips murmuring — along with incomprehensible things that sounded as if they were in a foreign language — ‘That is not the way to cross the Styx.’
For many years I was convinced that it was the Pilot who had said that to me and I developed many theories: false, semi-false, three-quarters true, spiritualist, superstitious and religious (the most dangerous of all) theories about who the Pilot might be. It takes a long time, a terribly long time before one realises what powers can disguise themselves as a pilot, it is an agonising journey through swamps full of will-o’-the-wisps.
‘The solution is very simple,’ say those ‘profound thinkers’ who know nothing at all. ‘Schizophrenia,’ say those who like juggling with words such as psychoanalysis, hysteria, mysticism, soul, magic, seeking God, spiritual rebirth, inner life — and cannot distinguish between growth and decline.
‘Jesus Christ’ is the ‘Pilot’ say others, the ‘devout’ Christians who have to let go of God’s hand when they want to light a cigarette.
‘The control spirit is the Pilot,’ say the spiritualists, who have to ask a table when they want to know what things are like on the other side instead of learning how to cross over themselves.
When I woke from the deep sleep I called ‘dreamless’, I was overcome by an obsession which sometimes seemed childish. In the first two years I was driven solely by the compulsion to experience spiritualist phenomena. Any crank, fortune-teller or fool running round in Bohemia attracted me as an electric rod attracts scraps of paper. I invited dozens of mediums to my apartment and at least three times a week spent half the night in sessions with them and a group of friends I had infected with my monomania.
I continued this labour of Sisyphus tirelessly for seven years. All in vain. Either the mediums failed or they turned out to be deliberate or unconscious swindlers. But I was never fooled, not even one single time.
Even after the first two years I was beginning to have doubts, which grew stronger and stronger: could all the famous investigators in this area be wrong after all?
I could not believe that. The Pilot kept whispering to me when I was fast asleep not to give up the search. It was as if, night after night, I felt the lash of the whip from an invisible hand driving me on through new swamps full of strange will-o’-the-wisps. I bought any books on mediumism and similar topics that appeared: English, American, French and German books. One mirage after another appeared before me. Many, many times I decided to rid myself of this urge to seek out the unfathomable, by force if necessary, but every time I realised after only a few hours that it was too late, it was no longer possible. I was horrified, and yet secretly glad.
My brow grew more and more fevered, I was tormented by all sorts of ambitions; a lust for life, such as I can hardly understand today, flooded my whole being. But when I woke late in the morning after a night of wild excess (strangely enough such bouts of riotous living often followed immediately on spiritualist sessions, as if I had been plugged in to psychic batteries of the worst kind) I was never affected by the dreariness of the day, neither by disgust nor remorse — during the hours of sleep the mysterious bellows of the underworld of the soul had fanned the yearning for the world beyond the Styx to renewed ardour.
With the frivolity of youth I probably believed it would continue like that my whole life through. I had no idea that I was being torn apart. My destiny began to move at a gallop and I didn’t notice. I did not notice that my whole being had gradually lost sight of any grey, that soon all it saw was bright white and deep black, all it could do was love to the point of self-abandon and hate utterly. I didn’t hate people because they did me harm — for no reason at all I often felt them to be friends — nor did I love others, even though they were good to me; whole types of people literally made my hair stand on end just to think of them; it wasn’t racial difference that awoke the hatred in me, it was above all that category of people who somehow remind one of the serene detachment that expresses itself outwardly through hair combed down over the ears or through a well groomed full beard and a ‘dependable’ expression. A psychoanalyst would say, ‘The type of which it says in Revelations, “I will spue thee out of my mouth.” This clearly must have its origin in a psychological complex and experience from earliest childhood that has been erased from your memory.’ Perhaps he’s right. But I do not think so. I suspect it is rather a warning from the Pilot, a warning of some event that will happen in the distant future, perhaps even in another — incarnation. Perhaps the devil will appear to me then, so that, in the habit of a pastor, I can not throw the inkwell at him.
This division into black and white grew stronger with the years, which was striking enough, since with increasing age the opposite usually happens: the contrasts blur in that banal grey that poets praise as the golden mean.
I have said that for a long time I did not realise that I was being torn apart. I did see, with growing fear, my ship of life being drawn into treacherous whirlpools from which it looked as if it would soon be impossible to escape. I won’t describe them; given the calamitous situation under which everyone is suffering today9 they would seem petty. ‘Is that all? I wish I had those worries,’ people would say. All I will say about the whirlpools and cyclones I was drifting towards is that at the time whenever I read in the newspaper that someone had been found in the woods, starved to death, or had hanged himself, I would say to myself, ‘Is that all? Suicide — what an easy way out!’
Whenever I could see no way out in my everyday life, I would think, ‘The Pilot, who is guiding me across the Styx in his special way, will help me.’And the more fervent my hopes, the more certain they were to be dashed. That was the most awful part of it.
People who had experienced a severe earthquake told me there was nothing more terrifying, more spine-chilling, than to feel the ground, which from earliest childhood you have believed to be absolutely unshakeable, shifting under your feet.
No! There is something even more terrible: to see one’s last hope fade.
But at last I thought I had found what I had so long been looking for: an association of people, Europeans and Orientals, in central India, who claimed to possess the true secret of yoga, that ancient Asian system that shows the way to the steps that take us far above everything that is weak, incomplete, everything that is mere powerless humanity …
Note
9 Probably 1915.