For thousands of years mankind has directed its efforts towards escaping our earthly suffering by finding and understanding the laws of nature in order to make use of them. The discoveries and inventions that have been made in this area are extraordinary; even more astonishing is the loss in everything connected with our instincts. The Germans in particular seem determined to become the nation most lacking in instinct, they showed it before the War, during the War and after the War. Unfortunately! Anyone nowadays who prefers to obey the voice of instinct, instead of listening solely to that of reason, and does not stick faithfully to the conventions derived from previous experience, which are often no longer valid, is dismissed as a fanciful dreamer at the mercy of chance. Humans are relying more and more on their reason gland and since that does not tell them anything connected with magic and other hidden powers of the soul, they imagine such things do not exist, or are of little value. It is an old misapprehension to assume a person guided by feeling is more or less the same as one who follows the guidance of their soul — proof of how shallow our knowledge of the soul has become! That explains the open contempt of the cold, rational person when others talk about ‘soul’. The emotional type, he tells himself, is not up to the demands life makes on us and therefore has no right to exist. Perhaps in many cases he is right. ‘My kingdom is not of this world,’ the other will reply; but he is only saying it, inside he would very much like to do as well in this world as the rational type. He is, therefore, deceiving himself, the worst thing anyone can do. What both have in common is that they delude themselves that it is activity in the outside world that will let them prosper. Their hopes are vain, they are like a fool who thinks he can get rid of the shadow on the wall by covering it with whitewash. It is good fortune and a kindly fate alone that bring success; a superficial person, who sees only immediate causes, never those in the innermost depths of our being, is mistaken when he assumes that competence and efficiency are the sole key to success. Anyone who has learnt to observe life with a sharp eye and is not blinded by vanity knows that you cannot just grab competence like an object whenever you want if it is not already there in your blood; it is not even something you can acquire by training, it is a piece of good fortune that brings further good fortune, perhaps inherited in some cases or, as believers in the Asiatic doctrine of reincarnation say, a reward for things you have done in an earlier existence.
It is astonishing how indifferent this generation, so greedy for invention, is to the question of whether we can consciously become master over chance, fortune and misfortune, directing them at will. ‘Because it is impossible,’ comes the answer from millions of mouths.
Have you tried? Have you ever tried, tried and tried again to defeat even minor bodily illnesses and pain? Not by stuffing yourself full of medicine and following the advice of the doctor, whose science often fails? Embarrassed silence, a contemptuous smile; and they continue busily whitewashing the shadow on the wall. Any attempt to change oneself heart and soul into a person who is master not only of illnesses and minor trials and tribulations, but of chance and misfortune, is looked on as utter madness. Especially by those who proudly insist they are masters of their own will, but are in reality the most miserable slaves of an alien will-power, which secretly directs all their doings without them having the least suspicion it is so — they especially refuse even to try. They are slaves of the demiurge, which they look on as their god, as the one who determines their fate. And for them he does. Anyone who relies on others, even if those others are gods, is lost.
Philosophical knowledge alone can save us from the treadmill our life has become, and probably always has been from the very beginning — thus say those of the human race who possess understanding. But have our philosophers escaped the treadmill? Was Kant able to rid himself of so much as a toothache? One could object that he didn’t try. I do not believe that. I am sure that at one time or another he will have thought: how odd that I know so much, yet am no farther forward in the ability to do things. And even if the idea did not occur to him, it must have to the man of ‘sound common sense’. Our European philosophers have thought up incredibly profound theories about life, existence and the phenomena of the visible world, and they have demonstrated the correctness of their discoveries logically, with mathematical precision even; but they have not shown how to become master over fate. Their insights have remained kiwis: flightless birds. There is a yawning gap separating theories from practice, they are like women who have no children. Simply transposing knowledge does not produce a change in destiny. You cannot think away the shadow on the wall; to change it you must change the position of the object between the light and the wall. Anyone who can do that — figuratively speaking— will become master of their fate. Of course it is possible that it will only make the ‘shadow’ uglier than it was before, but that is the fault of the person, who performed the operation wrongly. The deed must be preceded by knowledge.
Is there such knowledge? It is there, proof against rust like gold; rare and covered in filth, it still comes to light again and again, seemingly worthless to those who have eyes yet cannot see. Glittering mica it is for those who are alive yet know not why; foolishness for the numberless herd of humanity which, mindless and indifferent to everything that has not been drummed into it or secretly poured into its ears as the poison of the snake from the Garden of Eden, forever follow the same dreary road towards the realm of the dead, in a never-ending stream, like the migration of the eels down the river to their spawning grounds and into the fishermen’s nets. This behaviour, in both eels and men, would be incomprehensible if their stoic equanimity did not rest on the inner assurance, secretly gleaming beneath the threshold of consciousness in both man and beast: ‘I will not die, death is an empty phantom.’ That is the only possible explanation why, if a person falls in the water, dozens of others risk their own lives and jump in to save them. If, on the other hand, they could save them by handing over money they wouldn’t do it! Bürger’s ‘Song of the Honest Man’ who refused payment for his bravery, has never been true. People fear life, only they don’t realise it!
Many decent people delude themselves into thinking we humans are all, without exception, doomed to perdition unless we ‘search our soul’, repent, put the world behind us and all the other admonitions of pious zealots. The result? Many listened to them, beat their breast, then went off and spilt the blood of those who didn’t believe in the same things as they did. Later, customs became less violent, but not because people had become better — just more indolent, less fanatical. They go to their churches on Sunday, behave as if they were taking to heart the things some well-meaning man reproaches them with from eleven to twelve, then they go back home, hang up their Sunday suit in the wardrobe and the Code of Civil Law continues to take precedence over the Book of books. Not least because it’s got a flexible binding. And it’s always the same in the Tragedy of History: each act ends with Bolshevism, the ‘religion’ of despair; followed by the interval, a new act, which you’d say was exactly the same again if the actors weren’t wearing different costumes. And, as always, knowledge, the true knowledge that really matters, remains behind the scenes, ignored. It’s not allowed on stage, the actors won’t let it appear, they’re afraid it might steal their applause.
It is thirty-six years since I first had an inkling of the mysterious Masked Figure behind the scenes of life. It only gave me mute signs, which for a long time I did not understand. I was still too young to comprehend what the figure was trying to tell me, I was still too captivated by the play being acted out on the stage. I imagined the play was important and had been written specially for me. Then, when I wanted to take part myself but found the role assigned to me unsatisfying, I was overcome with a furious, unbridled hatred for the players in their make-up. I saw their ‘soulful’ eyes, which in reality were trying to spot where their neighbour kept his purse, realised that the marvellous set was not a real palace, just painted cardboard, and poured out my fanatical hatred of all these histrionics in satires, or whatever you might call them.
The Masked Figure had only given me brief hints, but they were like an inspiration; they were enough to turn a businessman into a writer overnight. I will describe how that was possible in more detail later on. It happened through the transformation of the blood. A few quick, mute signs from the Masked Figure brought it about. For a long time I was convinced that all those beside me and around me in their make-up and costume were professional actors, until I gradually realised that some of them were so firmly convinced of the genuineness of the character they were playing that they had turned into it without being aware of it. They play their role, having forgotten that they were sent to join the actors against their will, that a hypocritical gang of directors engaged them when they were very young. Then my hatred began to fade, especially when I saw that they only just managed to attain their goals and very often they were other goals than the ones I was aiming for. Then I started hinting, in novels and stories, at the Masked Figure behind the scenes. Many pricked up their ears, others shook their heads and muttered, ‘What’s he on about? There’s no one behind the scenes.’ Did those who pricked up their ears spend long enough staring into the darkness, where I told them they could see the Masked Figure standing? How can I know? Some will have lost patience and turned back to the colourful satyric drama on the stage of life with its bright, artificial lighting. ‘Crazy!’ is probably their assessment of me and those I once wounded with my hatred join in, saying, ‘He lied deliberately! He’s a hypocrite, he has no ideals.’ In one way they are correct: their ideals are not mine, I have an absolute hatred of make-up and bombast.
From the very beginning I interpreted these brief hints from the Masked Figure correctly. The more important signs and signals I only came to understand slowly, for life placed other images before my eyes; it interposed itself as an interpreter between myself and the veiled figure when I proved incapable of understanding his gestures by digging deep within myself. I was faced with the poisoned heritage of all humans, the belief that we can only enrich ourselves from the knowledge of others, we can only drink our fill from mankind’s past. The interpreter, standing between myself and the Masked Figure, spoke a different language from the one intended for me, lying and sometimes, so that I would not notice the lies, telling the truth. I clung on to just one absolutely clear hint from the Masked Figure, despite the interpreter’s scornful expression: wherever and whenever I could, I pointed to the figure behind the scenes. Whether people I spoke to about it believed me or not, whether they laughed, listened attentively, suppressed a smile or made an effort to keep a straight face, it didn’t bother me. Often, even today, perhaps today more than ever, I cannot stop myself thinking, ‘What’s the point? Let the eels continue on their merry way!’
But the Masked Figure had me completely in his power, his will was stronger than mine. For a while he disappeared from view or, to be more precise, changed his form; at such times it was as if I could see his ‘face’. That lasted for years. During that time the interpreter, life, spoke to me through books which often came into my hands in such strange ways that I couldn’t shake off the feeling that an invisible schoolmaster had taken charge of my education. And every time a book on yoga was sent to me, I thought I had finally found the key to the secrets I was longing for. It had very quickly become clear to me that yoga, that strange, profound educational system of the Asiatic peoples, and not the philosophical theories of the thinkers and sages, was the sole road to a superhuman existence. Chance — fate travelling incognito, as a Russian once called it — gave me books that said so. I also came into contact with people who seemed to know more about yoga than the scholars who were learned in Indian writing. Whenever I heard the name of someone who appeared to be an initiate in these matters, I wrote to them, I hunted for them as if they must possess the elixir of life. I was gripped by an obsession: find them, find them, find them. I could write volumes about my experiences with such ‘initiates’. In order to find a certain Captain Searle of the Anglo-Indian Marine Survey who, I had been told, was the disciple of a hathayogi (fakir) and could calm typhoons by repeating certain mantras, I sent several dozen letters to Australia, America, England, India and China. When one of them finally reached its goal, Captain Searle had died a week previously.
I joined the Theosophical Society, founded a lodge in Prague and went round roaring like a lion to recruit members; I gave talks to a small group from English siftings and pamphlets. The only lasting reward for all my efforts was that I eventually acquired an ability in what you might call sight-translation, so that today I can read out aloud from an English book as if it were in German. Annie Besant rewarded me for my zeal by accepting me into a certain inner circle, the centre of which is in Adyar in India. I received a number of letters from her with instructions about yoga. From that moment until my resignation from the Society some three months later I led the life of a man who was almost mad. I existed on nothing but vegetable matter, hardly slept at all, ate a tablespoon of gum arabic dissolved in soup twice a day (it had been most warmly recommended to me by a French occult order for the purpose of awakening astral clairvoyance) performed asana exercises (Asiatic sitting positions with crossed legs) for eight hours night after night, at the same time holding my breath until I was shaking fit to die. Then, at the new moon, I rode out in complete darkness to a hill well outside Prague, known as the Cave of St Procopius, tethered my horse to a tree, sat in the asana position and stared at a point in the sky until it began to grow light. The instructions for all this, insofar as they had not come from Annie Besant herself, I had extracted from books of Indian or medieval provenance. And whenever my faith was threatening to collapse and I was beginning to despair, some second-hand bookseller would send me a catalogue of books on yoga, magic and the like which I had not yet come across and which buoyed me up with more false hopes.
One winter’s night, when the snow was so deep it was impossible to ride out to my hill, I was sitting on a bench by the Moldau. Behind me was an old bridge-tower with a large clock. I had already been sitting there for several hours, wrapped up in my fur coat, but still shivering with cold, staring at the greyish-black sky, trying everything possible to attain what Mrs Besant had described to me in a letter as inner vision. In vain. From earliest childhood I had been surprisingly devoid of the faculty many people possess of being able to close their eyes and imagine a picture or a familiar face. It was, for example, quite impossible for me to say whether one or other of my acquaintances had blue, brown or grey eyes, dark or brown hair, a straight or curved nose, if I had had not previously looked at it specifically to ascertain that. In other words, I used to think in words, not in images. I had sat down on this bench with the firm resolution of not getting up again until I had succeeded in opening up my inner vision. My model was Gautama Buddha who had once sat under the bo tree with a similar resolution. Of course, I only stuck it out for about five hours and not, like Him, for days and nights. Suddenly I wondered what time it was. Then, just at the moment when I was being torn from my contemplation, I saw, with a sharpness and clarity with which I could not remember ever having perceived any object before in my life, a huge clock shining brightly in the sky. The hands showed twelve minutes to two. It made such a profound impression that I clearly felt my heart — not miss a beat, no: beat extraordinarily slowly. As if a hand were gripping it tight. I turned round and looked at the tower clock, which until then had been behind me. It is completely out of the question that I should have turned round earlier and thus got some idea of what time it was, for I had sat on the bench for five hours motionless, as is the strict requirement for this kind of concentration exercise. The clock, just like the one I had seen in the sky in my vision, showed twelve minutes to two.
I was overjoyed. There was just one faint worry: would my ‘inner eye’ stay open? I started the exercise again. For a time the sky remained greyish-black and closed, as it had been before. It suddenly occurred to me to see if I could make my heart beat in as calm and controlled a manner as it had done of its own accord when I had had the vision, or possibly, most probably even, before the vision. This did not occur to me the way things usually do, rather it was like a dimly perceived deduction or instruction from the sense of one of the Buddha’s sayings which came to me as if from the invisible lips of the ‘Masked Figure’. The saying was, ‘Things come from the heart, are born of the heart and subject to the heart.’ In that night this saying penetrated deep into my blood. It is not just a beautiful axiom, which one can appreciate as such when reading it and let it go in one ear and out of the other, no, it is the essence of a whole philosophy: the realisation that everything we think we perceive here on earth and in the material cosmos as existing objectively outside us is not material, but a state of our own self. This saying is also the subtle key to true magic and does not consist merely of theoretical knowledge. Often in my life when I thought I was lost it has helped me, like a strong hand held out in support. When, many years later, I fell 1,000 feet from the Dent du Jaman, it came into my mind at the moment when txt]I first hit the ground, with my left shoulder, and managed to twist my body and thus change the direction of my fall, with the result that I didn’t eventually land in a quarry, but in a gully full of soft snow. Was it the Buddha’s saying that saved me? Was it that that gave me the flash of inspiration: turn your body! Who could say for certain? But it does seem to me that that was the case.
I sat on the stone bench and stared at the sky again. Finally I managed to bring my heart to the state of calm it had previously been in. The result was immediate. It was as if a circular piece of the night sky were receding, as if it were coming away from the atmosphere and retreating into more and more immeasurable depths of space. As it was happening, I observed myself as clearly as I could and it soon became clear to me that the sole purpose was that I should make the line of vision of my two eyes parallel. At the same time I recalled reading that sleepwalkers in a state of trance always looked as if their gaze were fixed on the distance. It was not long before I had not only achieved a degree — a small degree, but still sufficient — of control over my heart, but also over the direction of my gaze and this was immediately followed by something I had never seen before in my life: geometrical shapes formed in the round hole in the sky. The first sign was the so-called in hoc signo vinces: a cross within a capital ‘H’. I looked at it coolly, as if uninvolved, without a trace of conceit or anything like that. Which was quite natural, since even in those days I had very little time for Christian ecstasies. It was merely as an ‘observer’ that I was interested to see this particular time-honoured sigil leading out the procession of my visions. Then other geometrical figures made their appearance, some of them similar to the magic signs you see in medieval Faust books. All of them were colourless. It was only much later that I saw images, bright and colourful pictures, often Greek statues, for example Pallas Athene.
All these images had one main thing in common: they were so sharp, so bright and in such glorious colour that the things of this earth seemed pale and blurred. However difficult it might be to understand, sometimes I could see them from all sides at the same time, as if my inner eye were not a lens, but a circle drawn round the visionary image. Eventually my inner eye became so practised that I could conjure up my visionary faculty at will, even when my external self was not at rest at all, for example when I was involved in a trivial conversation with someone or other. One of my favourite exercises was to observe, while I was reading the newspaper in the coffee house, a large tangle of rope that often appeared to me and then to untangle it in my mind, knot by knot, as clearly as if it were really there before me, until finally it was neatly coiled up, like the anchor hawser on a ship. There is one fact which I consider very important, since for me it proves that it is not my external person alone that calls up these images, but something that lies deeper: even today I cannot conjure up at will any image I happen to want. It would be of no value if I could. It would have failed in its true purpose of communication to me; then it would just be my everyday consciousness speaking to me of things which I already know of in other words.
The faculty of inner vision which I acquired or opened up during that winter’s night was, by the way, the first turning point in my destiny that changed me, at a stroke so to speak, from a businessman to a writer: my imagination became visual. Previously I had thought in words, from then on I could also think in images; in images which I saw as if they were really there before me; no, a hundred times more real, more immediate than any physical object. ‘Vision’ has become a hackneyed word on the lips of the many; few have actually experienced one but everyone ‘knows’ exactly what a vision is supposed to look like. I myself used to prattle on like that when my eyes were still blind. A writer is praised if he has a keen talent for the observation of nature and can put it on paper by means of ink. He’s a wretched photographer, nothing more. That kind of thing has nothing to do with the art I am talking about. With the theatre, perhaps. Vision probably has the greatest influence on painting, provided that it does not take hold of the painter’s eye and innermost feeling alone, but also his hand, enabling it to reproduce the image. I know many painters and have made great efforts to explain to them that they wouldn’t need a model if they only knew how to open their inner eye. They listened, uncomprehending; none has tried to follow my advice. They prefer to make tracings of nature, bewitched by the stupid principle that nature (external nature, that is) is the teacher of all art.
When I wrote a long letter to Mrs Besant after my experience on the stone bench, she was silent for a long time. Then I received her answer: try to rend the veil. I did not understand what she meant and kept asking again and again. From the empty platitudes she sent me — at least that was what they seemed to me — I quickly came to the conclusion that Mrs Besant had no idea what to do with me. (A strange event, connected with further visions I had, eventually cut the tie binding me to the Theosophical Society.) I continued my researches into yoga and eventually came upon the area that in India is called bhakti yoga (yoga, practised through the search for God, devotional fervour and religious ecstasy). The Masked Figure — or should I call it a kindly fate? — saved me from being afflicted with and crushed or torn apart by ecstasies, as are all those unfortunates (or fortunates, if they reach the goal) who suffer schizophrenia, show stigmata or see the ‘light’, like Ruysbroeck, and ‘unbecome’ in it, imagining they have found God as an object, forgetting that the Only God they are always talking about can never be anything but a subject. To me they are like mothers who carry a child and die when they give birth. Who knows whether in this way changelings are not sometimes born in the invisible world of causes and then — growing into Molochs — send that poison trickling into the brains of humanity which we call a spiritual epidemic, such as Bolshevism at present or the Children’s Crusade in the past?
Before being accepted into the inner circle of the Theosophical Society, people are given (as I was) the stern warning: ‘Anyone who does not hold firm until the end, will be exposed to unheard-of danger in the spiritual realm.’ When I informed Mrs Besant that I was leaving the Society, her reply was brief: ‘I know, the snakes of Mara (an Indian expression for the Tempter) are many.’
I shall indicate the nature of the main experience which persuaded me to leave the Theosophical Society. The real purpose of the three months probationary period before final acceptance into the ‘Inner Circle’ is for one to find one’s ‘guide’. A guide is a fundamental prerequisite and essential on the path of yoga and magic. Since I assumed the images that appeared to me would give me a hint or indication of how I might find a guide, I made constant efforts to draw out more and more new visions from inside me. (By calming my heartbeat and making the sightlines of my eyes parallel, as mentioned above.) One night, again at around two o’clock, I was sitting in my bachelor’s room in the padmasana (lotus position) practising pranayama (controlled breathing) as prescribed by the ham-ssa which consists of drawing and expelling breath through the left then the right nostril alternately. A strange numbness in the head is the usual consequence of this exercise. At the time I did not know — fortunately did not know! — that the secret purpose of hamssa-pranayama is to induce a kind of self-hynnosis. (I was told that by a young Brahmin, whom I only met in 1914.) Instinctively I fought against the numbness; if I had not, I would today probably be an unhappy medium or suffer from some other kind of schizophrenia, perhaps even religious mania. As it was, I clung to a valuable piece of advice (advice which is a jewel in Buddhist doctrine): always remain conscious. Sitting motionless, I stared fixedly at a large black circle on the wall, which I always had hanging there for the purpose of these exercises. Suddenly the paper circle became bright; it was as if a shining disc had come in front of it. I was completely awake and my mind clear. Then a figure the size of a grown man appeared, dressed in white, but with no head! I had already read a large number of occult books by then and since I have an excellent memory — and already had as a young man — a passage from one of them immediately occurred to me. It said specifically: apparitions in human form without a head signify extreme danger for those who see them. A feeling of uneasiness crept over me, but I still continued to stare at the illuminated disc. Why is this happening to me, I asked myself, despite the fact that I do not take drugs, like morphine addicts who, as their final collapse approaches, have visions of people with their heads cut off? A face below a turban — separated from the body by a gap the width of a finger — then began to form and its features gradually became clear. It looked so old it would be difficult to find a comparison. The vision remained for a while, then disappeared all at once. But the impression stayed with me for almost a whole day, as if it had etched itself on my consciousness: I could not dismiss it, as I had other visions. It gave me an extremely unpleasant feeling, which only faded the following night, when — in the deserted street as I made my way home from a meeting of the lodge of the Theosophical Society I had founded — I once more immersed myself in meditation exercises connected with finding a guru. Again my heartbeat calmed down and, despite the fact that the street was well lit and I was walking fairly quickly, a greenish beam of light the thickness of a man shot down from the sky a few yards in front of me. Where it hit the ground it split into three parts, forming a three-pointed anchor. I stopped and observed the phenomenon coolly and calmly. Not for a second did I have the feeling it was anything other then a vision. Here once again my refusal to be disconcerted by visions proved its worth. I kept a tight hold on my heart — I could almost say by force — for I sensed that the beam of light wanted to have a stronger effect on me than had ever happened with any of my previous visions. I can very well imagine that if a person with no experience in this area had a similar experience, they would delude themselves into thinking they were having a so-called divine revelation and be swept away, with nothing to cling on to and no lifebelt, into the boundless sea of theistic delusion.
At this point I would like to state expressly that in my personal opinion everything — everything!— to do with theism is a will-o’-the-wisp that leads us astray. I am not saying this in order to shake or shatter anyone’s pious faith. As I have said before, I do not believe those who stumble through life indifferent to everything connected with the occult and materialistic to the core are doomed to absolute perdition. Far be it from me to assume that the ‘hot ones’ — those with theistic convictions — will be spewed out from the mouth of life. If I were to declare my own belief, it would perhaps best be as follows: who is the Jacob of the old Testament, who wrestled with an angel of the Lord for a whole night until he prevailed over him? Answer: one who does not follow the thorny path of theistic faith!
Ramakrishna, the last Indian prophet — the English scholar, Max Müller, has emphasised his great importance — Ramakrishna, a bhakta yogi par excellence, once said, ‘A person serves their God for a long time, following everything He says to them, doing everything He does, just for His sake and in His honour, being less to Him than a slave. But then one day God hands over all power to His loyal servant, whom He places on His own throne.’ This, be it noted, for those (and it will not be that many!) who follow, or long to follow the path of the bhakta.
When the light stood before me as I described it, I asked myself, ‘What can this mean? What is it supposed to be telling me?’ It never for a moment occurred to me to immerse myself in it as an uplifting sight, as a religious person might have done. Immediately the answer came to me in a ‘thought’ — I call it a thought because I can think of no other expression, in fact it was almost like hearing a voice, which informed me, ‘The anchor means holding fast or hoping; the three prongs mean three days.’
Three days later something happened that was so strange I can scarcely bring myself to write it down for fear people might think I am fabricating it and making fun of all those who are reading what I have written. Must I insist that that is not the case? You can believe me or not, as you like. On the third morning after that night, I went to my business, a bureau de change in Prague. The servant was just sweeping out the office; none of the other staff was there. I was a little surprised to see, despite the early hour, a gentleman sitting in the waiting room and so asked him what he wanted. He was well-dressed, middle-aged, wearing glasses and had a squint. In reply he muttered a few incomprehensible words then pulled himself together and said with somewhat forced determination, ‘I want nothing from you. I thought you wanted something from me.’ I immediately recalled: ‘Wait three days,’ the words that had come to mind when I saw the anchor. From the conversation with the stranger that quickly followed, I learnt that he was called O. K., that he had spent a long time as a professor or teacher of chemistry in Japan, that he had been living for some time now in Dresden and was a spiritualist. But not a spiritualist in the usual sense, rather a ‘pious’ man, a kind of Christian bhakta yogi. He had possessed the gift of automatic writing since he was a child, he told me; however, it wasn’t ‘spirits’ that spoke through his writing but none other than Jesus Christ Himself. I listened patiently and soon realised that I wasn’t dealing with a swindler, as had often been the case, but at worst with a religious fanatic. I must point out that, despite my young years, I was even then an uncommonly sharp judge of character and perfectly capable of distinguishing lies from truth. Which was hardly surprising. Anyone who, like me, has entered the banking profession at a young age very quickly learns to read other people like an open book.
I invited Professor K. to go with me to my apartment, since a bureau de change did not seem the right place for a discussion of the occult, yoga and prophecy. Once there, Herr K. told me that three days ago — the time corresponded exactly to that of my vision! —he had as usual been occupied with automatic writing when suddenly his hand had refused to finish the sentence he had begun and had instead written a new sentence: Go to Prague to see a banker by the name of M. (me, that is) so that you can be with him early on the morning of the third day.
K. assured me he had never heard my name before. He had travelled to Prague to see what he might find and had sought me out. When I asked what he had to tell me, he said he didn’t exactly know but he had the feeling I was in great danger and it was up to him to save me. He suspected I had fallen into the hands of ‘Asiatic devils’. (Up to that point I had not even hinted to him that I practised yoga.) I spent the whole day with K. listening to his strange, I might almost say rapt, discourse. He said there was only one way to change oneself from a dull normal person into a spiritually more valuable one and that was the path of revelation, which was granted to a person if they followed certain instructions, apocryphal and pious in the Christian sense, which could be most appropriately described as Rosicrucian, since they were alien to both the Protestant and Catholic churches. He gave me some of these instructions. Since he had an incredible store of knowledge and was a scholar in the best sense of the word, I gradually — I was considerably younger than him and therefore less self-assured than I might have been — fell under his spell. Even today it doesn’t surprise me; theism is in the blood of every person who has had a Christian upbringing. In people who do not concern themselves with spiritual matters in their later life, theism is replaced with something that looks like atheism. I suspect, however, that such atheism is seldom genuine; mostly it is theism that has been buried beneath other debris. As K. talked, the theism of my childhood years was aroused and became even more alive within me as the memory of the vision of the man with his head cut off suddenly seemed to take on a deeper meaning: it struck me as if it were a similar experience, if on a small scale, to that of St Paul on the road to Damascus.
K. told me of a number of books which would be particularly fruitful for me, above all, the works of a certain Jakob Lorber. I acquired them straight away and read them conscientiously. If ever a man felt sick, it was me reading those books. But, with a perseverance I cannot understand today, I managed to delude myself into believing that what was written there in sugary rosewater was the quintessence of salvation. But if my meeting with Professor K. had ended with nothing more than a recommendation to read the godly Jakob Lorber, the result would have been bearable. I would probably not have understood the meaning of the apparition of the ‘headless’ man later on, but I would have been spared years of suffering. Thirteen years of suffering to be precise. His visit finished as follows: K. had already boarded the afternoon train to Dresden when he suddenly turned round and said, ‘Oh yes, I have just remembered the most important thing I have to tell you. There is a man, Herr X., who lives in Vienna. He and many other former Theosophists, Germans and English, even an Indian Brahmin called Babajee, are the disciples of a genuine Rosicrucian who is said to be a simple craftsman living somewhere in Hesse. He knows and teaches the true yoga, on which the New Testament is secretly based.’
It was like a sudden flash of revelation. The Herr X. in Vienna he mentioned had been a friend of mine for some time. Moreover I knew a certain Dr Franz Hartmann, whom K. had also mentioned in connection with X. and who, as I knew or, rather, had been told by the Theosophists, was among the most profoundly initiated of the ‘initiates’ in yoga. If he and X. and others, whose names I prefer not to mention here, were disciples of the Rosicrucian O. K. had talked of, then I had finally found my guru, as the prophecy of the ‘Inner Circle’ of the Th. S. had said I would! I immediately went to Vienna to see my friend. He had a guest staying with him, an Englishman called G. R. S Mead who, as I knew, was secretary of the Theosophical Society in Adyar in India. By a sign he gave with his hand he indicated that he, too, was a member of the ‘Eastern School’ (the ‘Inner Circle’). I said I had recently had a certain experience and asked if I could speak openly before X. Mead nodded. I started by describing the apparition of the man with no head. Suddenly Mead asked whether the man had not been wearing a white Brahmin thread. I said yes. Had I noticed that it was tied in a knot? I closed my eyes, called up the image, immediately saw the knot clearly and described the way it was tied. Mead stood up, touched his forehead and said, ‘T’was the Master.’ I looked across at X. out of the corner of my eye; he appeared to be suppressing a mocking smile.
When I then started to describe my meeting with Prof. K., X. became more and more serious. When I mentioned his last words, his remarks about the Rosicrucian guru, he quickly placed his finger on his lips as a sign that I should stop speaking at once. I concluded the sentence with a few more words. Later he took me to one side and told me things about the Theosophical Society which horrified me. I believed them! The evasive answers Mrs Besant gave to my questions about yoga, the awful kitsch the Theosophical siftings sometimes contained — that and other things seemed to confirm my assumption that everything X. told me was true. On top of that I had, a short time before, received a letter from William Judge in New York (he was regarded as one who had been initiated directly by the so-called Mahatmas of Tibet), saying that the ‘Masters’ in no way recognised Mrs Besant as president of the Society and had specifically authorised him to inform all the members of the ‘Eastern School’ of that.
Everything I had so far believed now appeared uncertain. I spent the whole night in meditation exercises — no images appeared to give me a sign. The ‘Masked Figure’ seemed to have abandoned me. Professor K. had ‘inoculated’ me and the rash appeared: the next day I told my friend X. that I was prepared to recognise the ‘Rosicrucian’ (I was given his name) as my guide. X. listened very attentively to what I said, then showed me a telegram he claimed to have received shortly beforehand. It said that I had already been taken on by the guru a few days previously (the date coincided with that of my vision of the anchor). X. assured me that the Rosicrucian was clairvoyant in spiritual matters, sometimes in physical matters as well, and I could rest assured that the ‘new disciple’ meant me and no one else.
Full of rejoicing, I wrote to Annie Besant that, in accordance with the prophecy she had given me at the very start, I had found the man who must presumably be taken as the one behind the title of ‘guru’. Mrs Besant’s answer: ‘The snakes of Mara are many’— which I have already mentioned — came straight back. I immediately thought of the man without a head. Who is this suspicious ‘person’ with no head? I asked myself. A symbol of course, what else! But what did the symbol want to tell me? That disaster was approaching, I sensed. But what was the point of the warning if it did not tell me the way to escape the danger? What was the masked guide of my destiny trying to warn me of by letting me see the apparition of the headless Brahmin? I asked myself over and over again. But couldn’t find the answer. Was the ‘Eastern School’ the headless man? Was it the Rosicrucian guide I had just found? I wavered from one interpretation to another and back again. In the thirteen years of torment along the thorny path that followed I asked myself again and again. Asked without getting an answer, at least not the answer I wanted: a clear answer with no possibility of misunderstanding. I did of course get ‘answers’, but delphic ones, now they would say one thing, now the opposite.
Only today, years after these events, do I know precisely what the man with his head cut off meant. Anyone who thinks about it can easily work it out, but I am unwilling to spell it out myself. For reasons which anyone who has paid attention to what I have just written can guess.
A few weeks later I went to the place in Hesse where the Rosicrucian lived. He had been a weaver, could neither read nor write and had had strange experiences in the area of spiritualism, which he called the preparatory stage for acquiring true knowledge, which came solely from the heart, and nowhere else, when it began to speak. This speaking of the heart he called the ‘inner word’; it awoke gradually, he said, and was granted through ‘grace’ in the Christian sense. He showed his numerous disciples the way to this by giving them phrases, which he said he received from his inner voice for each one individually, to murmur to themselves. This murmuring-to-oneself, he said, would arouse our own heart’s ability to speak and, moreover, a certain alteration would take place in our bodies until at the end of the way Christ’s immortal body would be instilled in the disciple and with it Life Immortal. In his opinion one had to start with the body. Piety in the ecclesiastical sense was something he had little or no time for if it was not accompanied by this alteration of the body. If the only thing I had learnt from this man was that the body must be included in the transformation of the person through yoga, he would have earned my lifelong gratitude for that insight alone. It was, he said, completely impossible to achieve this alteration of the body through one’s own rational knowledge and by one’s own efforts.
He was right about that as well. ‘Something extra must come from above to bring about the change,’ was the way he put it. By ‘from above’ he of course meant Jesus Christ, the risen Christ who had overcome death and was with us day by day, and not the crucified Christ. For anyone who constantly visualised the crucified Christ, as did Catholic monks, especially the Jesuits, and not the living, risen Lord, would ‘have their bones broken’ or they would remain hanging on the cross. As an example he most often gave Katharina Emmerich, the nun who died in 1824 and who was reported to display the stigmata every Friday. His teaching regarding the transformation of the body was uncommonly profound and strange; it often reminded me of the Gnostics and their claims. He said that one had to experience everything from Christ’s life — baptism, the washing of His feet, the Last Supper, as well as the crucifixion — literally, in one’s own body, in the exact way it was written in the Gospels, otherwise it would remain pure theory, things one had heard or read, and would be no more than Christian edification. I came to know many of his 54 disciples and there was not one of them, with the possible exception of an old lady, whom I could call exaggeratedly pious. Apart from a few ordinary artisans, they were mostly elegant, genteel people. None, neither the ‘guide’ nor any of his disciples, showed a trace of asceticism or anything like that. Even stranger was the fact that with time almost all of us experienced in ourselves the ‘reactions’ which ‘J…’ — as we all called our guide — considered so important. Not only in visions, or mostly in dreams, but also on our own bodies, and that even though no one knew what phenomena would occur, since we were all strictly forbidden to tell the others what we had experienced, in order to exclude the possibility of autosuggestion. I will describe just one such reaction here: it consisted of letters appearing on one’s skin. (Medical science calls it ‘dermography’ and attributes it to hysteria, without of course knowing what hysteria actually is.) Each of these letters had a particular meaning and indicated the stage of development the person in question had reached.
A layman could easily incline to the superficial view that it was all just worthless religious emotionalism. That would be quite wrong! On the contrary, I can assure you that the ‘guide’s’ teaching method aroused an inner life the richness and worth of which no one who has not experienced something similar themself can imagine. This period of apprenticeship also included the transformation of the blood which compelled me to become a writer, not to mention other transformations which I cannot go into here. The first ‘loosening-up’ of my inner being, however, was brought about by the ‘eye-opening’ experience on the bench by the Moldau in Prague.
Here is an incident to illustrate the effect murmuring a phrase can have on a person and how profoundly it can change their character. One day Dr Franz Hartmann, who is well known in the history of the Theosophical Society and who was one of my co-disciples, came to the guide and asked him to take on a young man as a disciple, saying that he had seldom met anyone who seemed more suited to receive his teaching. For years, he went on, he had lived the life of an ascetic following the strictest rule, withdrawn from the world like a saint. The guide thought for a while, apparently listening to his inner voice, and then said in very certain tones, ‘You’re wrong, Fränzle’ — he was Swabian — ‘the man isn’t genuine, he just thinks he is.’ Dr Hartmann assured him he knew the young man very well; it was wrong to say he wasn’t genuine. ‘Then I’ll give him an exercise so you can see how things are in his heart of hearts,’ J… replied. Six months later Hartmann encountered the young man in a city, transformed into an elegant dandy. Greatly astonished, he asked what had happened. ‘Oh, I had only done the exercise you gave me from that Swabian fool for a few days,’ he said with a beaming smile, ‘when I had a kind of revelation and ditched all that mystical nonsense.’ A few months later he died from syphilis. ‘You see,’ J… said reflectively, when Hartmann told him, ‘he’s been revealed. Pity I couldn’t help him.’
Of the numerous disciples the guide had, only two experienced as good as no reactions. One was my friend L. — and the other myself. L. has now died, at a grand old age and with the composure of a saint. It will remain a mystery to me why he, who was a devout Christian, never experienced anything of that kind, even though the guide always called him his favourite disciple. As far as I was concerned, it is fairly understandable for, despite the crazy efforts I made to to feel at home, to delude myself into thinking I felt at home with J…’s ideas, I was never transformed from a Saul into a Paul.
For thirteen years I spent eight hours every day, without leaving out a single one — how often I put off the most important actions external life demanded of me! — repeating the mantras. Not a single reaction occurred. Whenever I poured out my distress to my ‘guide’, he gave me a long, earnest look and said, ‘You must be patient.’ The only thing I experienced were strange, piercing sensations in the palms of my hands and soles of my feet, the first, mild signs of stigmata. In others they were much clearer, some even had the marks, circular red spots. ‘The pains of crucifixion,’ our ‘guide’ called them, signs of the change of the blood. None of my co-disciples experienced states of ecstasy; if they had, our guide would have expressed extreme disapproval, for the main point of his teaching was that our waking consciousness should be sharpened and neither split nor weakened. And this remaining in one’s body, in contrast to ‘going out of oneself’, as was taught in the mysteries of the Ancient Greeks, is a further foundation stone, which is of greater value on the road to true yoga than anything else; by laying it inside me, the ‘guide’ gave me a jewel to take with me through my whole life. The fact is that there is a particular method of ‘leaving one’s body while still alive’ (a standard expression among trained occultists, though the process strikes me as different, not so coarsely sensual) and it is regarded as an initiation; in reality, it is the worst kind of schizophrenia imaginable. Sooner or later it results in mediumism — incurable schizophrenia. Thus, strange as it may sound, in their mysteries the Ancient Greeks were no other than victims of an illness. The exceptions are those who were able to leap over the chasm of: ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ The teaching of that simple man from Hesse culminated in the assertion that a person’s soul does not live in their body in order to leave it, in the way someone will turn back when they realise they are in a cul de sac, but in order to transform its physical matter. In many of his experiences he resembled Jakob Böhme, whom every educated person today knows as a wonderful man; as a clairvoyant he was superior to him in some degree, but he was far, far superior to him in this insight that it is wrong to turn away from the world, however sublime withdrawal from the world might seem.
Those who are interested in mysticism (the others, of course, will not even have bothered to repress the usual grins) will object that all mystics recorded in history, even Buddha Gautama, preached and taught: turn away from the world. The Buddha, for example, called it a house on fire which truth, common sense and reason would demand we flee as quickly as possible. I am aware of that, but everything within me cries, wrong, wrong, wrong. There is a certain truth in their teaching, but it can, indeed I am convinced it must, be interpreted quite differently. At least for a person of the present day. In this respect I beg to differ from the eminent models of the past. The past is always a poison when it is understood as dogma.
As I have already mentioned, of all the disciples of the man in Hesse I, along with my friend L., was the only one who did not experience the transformation of the body in the way that corresponded to the intentions of our ‘guide’ and to what, at the time, were also mine. His reassurance that I only needed to wait in patience kept me languishing in fervent hope for thirteen years. Later, after his death — which knocked more than a few holes in his prophecies and those of his disciples — L. told me that our ‘guide’ had confided in him that the fact that I did not melt in the furnace of the exercises was because deep down inside I was aiming for a quite different goal from the Christian one he taught. He saw his task, he said, as bringing me onto the ‘right’ road. I was astonished when my friend told me that. I had never revealed, not even by vague hints, how alien to me not only the Christianity of the church was and remained, but also the Rosicrucian-Gnostic variant of our ‘guide’. ‘Semitic superstition’ Schopenhauer once said, when he acknowledged the importance of the book The Oupknethat (containing the wisdom of the Vedic Upanishads). Even when I read them as a youth Schopenhauer’s words affected me like invigorating rays of light.
It is naturally not my intention to denigrate Christianity in any way in saying that; on the contrary, I am convinced the world would be a wonderful place if there were more (genuine) Christians. I simply wanted to confess that, despite the most fervent efforts, I have never managed to make the Christian faith my own, even though I was brought up in it from childhood. That kind of thing may well be child’s play for the lukewarm.
I called the thirteen years I was a disciple of that ‘guide’ a thorny path. And that it was truly, not only spiritually but also physically. It may sound strange, but all exercises, not only the ones I have described here but all yoga exercises, whether they are right or wrong, not only change one’s blood, they of necessity change our outward destiny as well. Naturally. You miss favourable opportunities and suchlike if you spend eight hours a day murmuring phrases to yourself instead of ‘knuckling down’ and ‘getting on with it’ (busy, busy, busy, eh!) — like the complete fool who’s writing this stuff, the enlightened citizen will say, preening himself on his great cleverness. True, for a while yoga has these consequences for a person, but even those who devote their lives to outward things do not have control over ‘chance’. Has mankind created anything really lasting? If we had, there ought to be gigantic remains surviving from primaeval times, unless your view is that in those days people went on all fours. The culture of an Atlantis has sunk, Egypt been destroyed, Niniveh laid waste, just as our creations will be swept away. Today people are saying that in the course of the last few decades the materialistic view of life has reached its end. Nonsense! If anything it has become even more crass, if that is possible. It has only been finished off in theory, and that only for the few who have followed the progress in epistemology or contributed to it. The rest have remained as blinkered as they always were. What do we hear if we tell a layman that our senses deceive us and that the things we perceive through them do not at all correspond to reality, which is not something that has only become known during the last few decades? Even people who have made such progress in ‘culture’ that they no longer eat fish with two knives and thus imagine themselves uncommonly superior, even such people say, ‘Ridiculous. If that were the case we wouldn’t be able to photograph the world!’ And, what is even more astonishing, even scientists, scholars and philosophers who believe the perceptible world is mere surface appearance and that everything is relative, even they rear up like a horse with the staggers when you ask them, ‘If that is the case, why don’t you admit the possibility of certain spiritualist phenomena, for example the materialisation of human and animal figures, the ability to pass through matter, the apport of objects from distant places? Such phenomena would be extremely easy to explain with the hypothesis — and I’m sure it’s correct — which you gentlemen have put forward. Why do you insist on denying their possibility so obstinately? They simply demonstrate that things that don’t happen every day do not have to be permanently excluded.’ Professor Wilhelm Ostwald, one of the most prominent scientists of the materialist school, has put forward an explanation of what movement basically is; it is eminently suited to explaining spiritualist and magic phenomena. How baffling, then, to hear what Ostwald has to say about the impossibility of occult phenomena. If that is the way our scientific luminaries behave, then how can we be surprised that the philistines laugh when they hear people talk of philosophical values?
The facts teach us that it will never be possible to overthrow the materialist view of the world by means of theory; the eels cannot be converted and diverted from their path that easily. It has to happen in another way. The practical application of the doctrine of yoga could prove to be the means to that end. For a while it looked as if spiritualism would have the honour of making the first breach, but then the swindlers managed to bring it into disrepute, with the result that the laws which underlie it and could provide a key to spiritual values are as hidden from view as ever. And even assuming that we succeeded in getting spiritualist phenomena generally recognised, it would still be quite likely that materialism would turn it into a further triumph based on the discovery of a new, more rarified material side of nature. For example the invention of the distillation of alcohol from potatoes, that is of a volatile, subtle substance from a coarse one, did not manage to undermine the materialist view of the world. We will only have taken the first real step when we can prove that thoughts can produce physical changes in matter. But that will not remove the last obstacle, for science will say, perhaps even prove that, despite appearances to the contrary, thoughts belong to the field of physics or chemistry — say to the realm of electricity. The victory of the purely spiritual view will only come when people can demonstrate in practical terms to themselves and to others that matter as such does not exist at all but, as the Vedanta and other similar systems of knowledge teach, is an illusion of the senses, an idea that has coagulated into apparent materiality. The only way to come to such a conviction, which cannot be shaken by anything, is through yoga.
What is yoga?
Yoga encompasses all exercises involving the soul and the mind, a practical activity, that is, in which people today are hardly involved at all. I would put it this way: yoga is the leaven, theoretical knowledge merely flour and water.
Everything connected with yoga seems to come from Asia. Does that mean the Asians are masters in this area? It is possible that they had the knowledge in ages from which nothing has come down to us; legends claim that is the case. The undeniable fact is that there is no one with us today whom we could approach as a master of yoga. Theosophists and occultists maintain that the true yoga masters live in solitary seclusion, inaccessible to people who live ordinary lives, but that is naturally difficult to prove. We have little more than faith and trust to rely on. Who can guarantee that those you come across here and there in India who do practise yoga are not simply seekers? Does not almost everything suggest that the lofty path of yoga, leading to marvellous destinations, has been blocked since prehistoric times, to be replaced by schizophrenia, hysteria, mediumism and other pathological conditions, instead of the opposite: the perfection of mankind? Campbell Oman, the author of a remarkable book on the ascetics, mystics and saints of India, tells of a European by the name of Charles de Russette, who had become a sadhu (a kind of penitent) and retired to a solitary existence in the vicinity of Simla. Russette told him he had seen Indian fakirs do the most wonderful things.
That kind of report can be read by the dozen; unfortunately most, when you look into them, turn out to be pure invention. When the British government was looking for a fakir who could perform one of the famous yogi miracles for the Wembley Exhibition, they could not find a single one! It is mostly travelling showmen who are wrongly seen as yogis — a result of the general ignorance as to what a yogi really is. Even an ascetic is not by any means a yogi, usually the opposite, in fact, namely someone who has taken piety to such an extreme that they have become schizophrenic. Yoga means something like ‘union’. A bhakta yogi such as Ramakrishna or, to name a European, Ruysbroeck, claim that in their ecstasies they achieve union with God, but one could just as well say they were experiencing schizophrenia. The fact that Ramakrishna sometimes worked ‘miracles’, as his disciples unanimously assert, does not prove that schizophrenia is out of the question; similar things happen with spiritualist mediums and people who have been hypnotised.
The ‘union’ the yogi aims for is, rather, the indissoluble oneness of a person with himself. Such union with oneself is not present in ordinary people, as is generally assumed. Every person has split consciousness, as has every animal. One only realises this after one has practised yoga for some time. Which is rather strange, since it would take only a little power of observation for everyone to realise that their self-awareness is anything but unified. The way our heart and digestion work independently, our powerlessness to resist moods and thoughts, which ‘occur’ to us and do not let go of us for a long time, dreams, our inability to resist our need for sleep and many other things are clear proof that we are by no means masters in our own house. Schizophrenics, then, in the wider sense of the word! Myths, fairy tales and legends indicate these defects: the broken sword that Siegfried forges anew, which the ‘dwarf’ was unable to do, despite his cunning and inventiveness; Sleeping Beauty, who must be wakened with a kiss, the Fall in the Bible. These all bear witness to the state we are in at present, at the same time pointing to a possibility of becoming whole — to yoga! The religions — this word also means union! — of the advanced nations do not simply set up moral laws but also aim, for those who take them seriously, at union with God. Yoga has nothing to do with God; the Buddhists have not included any gods at all in their system and still practise yoga!
The union yoga is aiming for is the amalgamation of the subconscious — or superconscious, if you will allow that word — with our everyday consciousness. Coué, the French pharmacist who caused such a stir with his successful cures a while ago, tried to achieve something similar with his method of autosuggestion. In my opinion he made the same mistake as all dualists, even the religious ones: he addresses the inner person, that is the one we are unconscious of, as tu, the familiar ‘you’! That only exacerbates the schizophrenia people are suffering from. I believe that anyone who follows Coué’s method conscientiously will wake up one day to find himself a complete hysteric. They will pay dearly enough for any cure which they may have brought about through Coué’s method.
The Christian Scientists are widely known today. The founder, the American Mrs Baker Eddy, claimed the Bible teaches that there are no illnesses, people just imagine they have them. The constant increase in the membership of the Church of Christ, Scientist, might suggest that actual cures sometimes occur when Mrs Eddy’s instructions are followed. Looked at in the clear light of day, Mrs Eddy’s theory is not much other than a deformed notion from the Vedanta. Coué made the mistake of addressing our subconscious as ‘you’ instead of as ‘I’ — if at all; Mrs Eddy, who, like all Anglo-Saxon females, remains tied to theism, calls on the Dear Lord as witness — as a strong-minded American she is naturally aware of all His intentions and in accordance with His will she preaches that one can conquer illness by thought. In a way, then, she addresses our subconscious as God. Once again we see the doctrine of yoga watered down! And the consequence? The method works for some and doesn’t work for others. Depending on whether they are profoundly or mildly schizophrenic.
In my case it both worked and failed. In 1900, to celebrate the new century, so to speak, I was struck down with the most awful illness of the spinal cord. Today I still believe it was the result of J…’s exercises, which were so contrary to my inner nature. The doctors, including Krafft-Ebing and Professor Arnold Pick, in brief, the most renowned specialists for such diseases, diagnosed spinal paralysis in the lumbar region. Three years later the symptoms had moderated slightly, but I could still only walk with the help of two sticks, and that with difficulty. For a long time I had tried to follow the rules and instructions of the Christian Scientists to rid myself of my illness. In vain. Then, one night, I was making my way home to the apartment I had at the time in Žižkov in Prague. It was at the end of a steep street, which was covered in ice so that I could only climb it with great difficulty, step by step, keeping my shoulder against the walls of the buildings. I stopped, despairing of ever getting home in the darkness. Then I suddenly recalled the Christian Scientists’ teaching of ‘thinking away’ an illness. I then performed the recommended exercise, with not the least hope that it would work, when I suddenly felt my feet, which for three years had been like numb lumps hanging from my ankles, come alive. One minute later I was completely well again, or so it seemed. Putting the two sticks under my arm, I literally sprinted up to my apartment, sliding on the ice like a schoolboy when the road flattened out. I went to bed, overjoyed at having recovered my health. When I tried to get up the next morning, I was as lame and ill as I had been before. However hard I tried, I could not regain the state I had been in the previous night. The doctor I told about this smiled to himself. I could tell what he was thinking: ‘The man’s a writer of fantasy, the story’s just a product of his overactive imagination.’ He explained: ‘You have suffered a physical change to the membrane of the spinal cord. That cannot be reversed by autosuggestion; and even assuming that is what happened during that night, it is impossible that it should return to its former state within a few hours.’
That incident made me think long and hard. For almost thirty years now I have looked on life as a kind of conditioning to which some invisible being (I used the image of the Masked Figure at the beginning of this article) is subjecting me. If anything happened to me which many other people would have regarded as meaningless or malicious, I immediately asked myself, ‘What is wanted of me?’ If I had toothache, I didn’t go straight to the dentist but tried for a few days to get rid of it by various methods of autosuggestion, for its ‘message’ seemed to be: ‘Learn to master your recalcitrant body.’ That miserable affliction, caused by nerves as thin as threads, seemed to me to be the ideal testing ground for me to practise the exercise of will-power. At the time I was, like everyone else I assume, under the delusion that the two little words: ‘I will’ could pull the stars down from the sky. In reality, they cannot even pull up a blade of grass. Since the effort of will always had the strange effect of making the toothache worse, I tried faith. Faith which, it is said, can move mountains. It turned out to be completely impotent, the nerve in my tooth took absolutely no notice of it whatsoever and did as it pleased. Didn’t even get worse. At least the effort of will seemed to have annoyed it; faith, on the other hand, did no more than elicit a smile. Then I tried all kinds of crazy cures, especially those Paracelsus — God rest his soul! — serves up in his treatises on the so-called ‘Mumia’. For example I took a little stick of wood, poked about on the nerve with it, then threw it into the fire thinking, ‘Ha, pain, you nasty little beast, now you’re getting burnt up. What do you say to that, eh?’ Sometimes the effect was astonishing. The pain seemed to have taken a fright and held its breath. Not for long, unfortunately, it very quickly saw through the ruse and got its own back with a renewed outburst of fury.
It was only slowly, very slowly in the course of my life that I came to understand the apparently mysterious law at work here. I will go into it at a later point. It is the overcoming of our congenital schizophrenia which is the universal remedy — through the transformation of the blood. Naturally this transformation proceeds at snail’s pace, for it is no mean feat to turn an ape-man into a perfected being. Nevertheless later on, when I had gone deeper and deeper into yoga, I managed almost every time to get rid of toothache by means of certain ‘exercises’, or whatever you might call them, and the effect was immediate and permanent, so that the dentist’s diagnosis was ‘arrested caries’.
The Asian yoga books appear to be very ancient. The Orientals obviously derive their knowledge from these books, especially from the Yoga-sutras of Patanjali, a legendary initiate. If the physiologists of today were to include this book in their investigations into the practical side, I do not doubt they would make discoveries in their own field which would astonish the world. Unfortunately it is only philologists and similar outsiders who have examined the book to determine its age and origins or to see how often the subjunctive is used, which is hardly designed to whet anyone’s appetite to go into it more deeply. A second book, on the surface a miscellaneous collection of utter nonsense, is the Hatha Yoga Pradipika. The Hatha Yoga system is abhorred by so-called authorities in India for it teaches how to master one’s own body and the Indians consider that stupid and contemptible since the be-all and end-all for them is to fly from reality and, connected with that, to leave everything that is crudely sensual behind them. Did not the venerable Sankaracharya, the founder of the Advaita school of philosophy and creator of the most sublime monism, teach that, ‘Man is like someone riding through the water on a crocodile, thinking is it a piece of wood. At any moment the beast could drag him down into the depths. Therefore man should get off the crocodile (the body and everything connected with it).’ In contrast to Hatha Yoga, Patanjali gives instructions in his Raja Yoga on how to master oneself by thought control.
As far as is possible for someone living now whom destiny compels to live in the world, I have tried out both systems in practice and have come to the conclusion that the two methods complement each other, though only if one does not follow them literally but grasps the meaning hidden behind the words. What the Kabbalah (esoteric Jewish doctrine) says about the Bible is also valid here: ‘Damned is he who takes the scriptures literally.’
The following incident clearly shows that the Indian fakirs — in most cases at least — follow the Hatha Yoga Pradipika literally and are led astray by it (or at best, or worst, to mediumism): Colonel Olcott, one of the founders of the Theosophical Society, went on a study trip to the famous ruined city of Karli, an ancient place where fakirs and hatha yogis gather. An aged ascetic came up to him, threw himself to the ground at his feet and begged Olcott to take him to an initiate, for he had sought in vain for one his whole life through. Just imagine: he had been a fakir from his youth and asked a European for advice in an area which is supposed to be the jewel in India’s crown!
What do we conclude from this? There are books and oral traditions in Asia, but only very few people can read, that is, understand them. I have already mentioned that joining J…’s spiritual school not only affected me inwardly but also changed my outward destiny. Of course, I cannot prove my life would not have followed the same course if I had not performed J…’s exercises; such a thing is impossible to prove! I am not alone in the opinion that yoga, performed seriously and fervently, will start a person’s outward destiny moving at a rapid pace. Indians say that anyone who practises the Gavatri (hymn to the ‘sun’) every morning and is not pure and does not know the rite of the Rigveda exactly, will be torn to pieces. Many examples from history are quoted. What happened to me was similar. As if a horde of demons had been let loose on me, my life turned into a succession of misfortunes until I sometimes felt close to ultimate despair. The illness of the spinal cord I mentioned was one of the softest blows of fate. Just as that has finally disappeared almost entirely, all the rest turned out to be bluff on the part of fate. Pointless then? Oh no! Everything would have been pointless had I not kept on asking myself, again and again, ‘Why?’ Naturally a so-called clever person would say, ‘If you had lived a nice quiet life as a respectable citizen and not as a crazy yogi and — admit it — as a bit of a rake, you’d have kept your health, acquired an imposing paunch and a three-foot long gold watch-chain to go with it and…’ — and could ask yourself on your deathbed, ‘What, actually, was the point of my life?’That, at least, would be my conclusion to his little speech.
Fortunately things turned out differently for me. I overcame the spinal illness, but that result was of secondary importance, the way I got rid of it through yoga, that was the key thing for me. I will describe later what the method I discovered consisted of so that one or other of you will be able to profit from it. That is the only reason why I am writing this. Some will feel I am taking up arms against religion and piety. I wouldn’t dream of it! Without religion most people would stumble into an abyss and collapse like cripples whose crutches had been knocked away from under them. My book has been written solely for those who want to walk upright. Moreover, yoga is, as the word itself says, religion = union; union not with a god, however, but with something that is very ‘godlike’ (if you insist) — with the Being everyone ought to be; with the Being one actually is without realising, blinded and mutilated by schizophrenia as we are.
In order to get a thorough understanding — and to see the weaknesses — of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika I have mentioned, it is necessary to be familiar to a certain extent with the different Indian systems which it appears to bring together in an integrated unity. Superficial readers will get the impression that it was written by domineering priests, who want to maintain the respect in which their caste is held both here and in the world beyond by promises of earthly prosperity. It contains formulas for becoming master over the ‘three worlds’ or as beautiful as Indra and so on; they consist of precepts telling you how long you must hold your breath (at least two hours a day) and many other things that seem equally impossible in order to achieve this. I do not doubt for one moment that one can acquire all this by these methods, but other people will not notice the change in a person who has been thus transformed into a Croesus or an Apollo! No more than one can see the beautiful dreams of an opium smoker. Another flight from reality, then, is what is being taught, and the most stupid one possible into the bargain. If you read reports about certain occult phenomena performed by yogis and sanyassis, for example the levitation of the yogi Govinda Swami, of which Jakolliot talks, you do wonder whether the promises of the Hatha Yoga Padipika shouldn’t be taken literally after all. But we should not let ourselves be deceived when there are sometimes phenomena associated with hathayogis which go beyond the realm of subjective perception and become visible for onlookers as well. It simply means that the fakir in question is nothing other than a spiritualist medium, as Govinda himself admitted when he said, ‘I myself can do nothing, it is the spirits of the departed who do everything.’And it is beyond doubt that one can become mediumistic by staring uninterruptedly at the end of one’s nose, as the instructions prescribe; after all the Scotsman, James Braid, proved that fixing one’s gaze like that induces self-hypnosis. When the fakir Hari Das, who, as Dr Honigberger reported, was buried alive for months, was asked what he had felt while his body was under the earth, said, ‘My soul roamed in wonderful regions.’ That means that Hari Das contrived a ‘leaving’ of his body such as was taught, in my opinion, in the mysteries of the Ancient Greeks. Something similar can be observed in the howling dervishes of the Near East during their ecstasies (literally ecstasy means ‘displacement’), although it is not so complete, for they retain a little of their waking consciousness and do not become corpselike, rigid and cold like Hari Das; a certain progress in my opinion, but far from ideal, for that would consist of being in possession of both one’s waking and one’s metaphysical consciousness at the same time, without heightening one at the expense of the other. A friend who had lived among the dervishes for a long time told me that certain Arab dervish sheikhs do achieve that. I have no means of checking whether it is true or not, but I imagine that even they will not achieve anything worthwhile in the sense I have always had in mind — that is having an effect here and not ‘on the other side’. They are all theists, what they experience is a god and not themselves. Escape from reality via a kind of schizophrenia.
In order to have a clear awareness of this side and the other side at the same time, one would have to start by being clear about the process of normal sleep — that is what I told myself when I had read enough about yoga and reports of fakirs, yogis and dervishes. Suddenly sleep, such an everyday occurrence in the lives of all creatures, seemed extremely suspicious and significant. I decided to carry out some experiments. Making an effort of will to keep sleep at bay for a few nights led nowhere, as I soon realised. Moreover there are enough cases reported in the medical literature which prove that a long absence of sleep, brought about by an injury to some part of the brain, does not cause any significant change in people. Two remarkable experiments which were successful took me a few steps farther towards understanding that sleep can make it possible for someone to ‘leave’ their body, or at least to produce an effect at a distance without physical contact. They convinced me that the old claim of clairvoyants, that that is the case, was highly probable.
Once I read in an old tome on the occult: ‘When the earthly person closes their eyes, the heavenly one opens them, and vice versa.’Also: ‘Thoughts we take with us into sleep become realities.’ I immediately tried it out. I had a friend, Artur von Rimay, whom I saw a lot at the time and who, like me, was keen to pursue metaphysical problems, and I went to bed with the firm intention of going to sleep and sending him a telekinetic sign by hitting a table in his apartment with a stick. In order to do this and the better to visualise the autosuggestion, I took a walking stick to bed with me, holding it tight while I tried to get to sleep. It is exceptionally difficult to fall asleep on command if you haven’t practised it for a long time; your thoughts keep wandering, pushing aside the intention you have set yourself. It is my belief that the Stymphalian birds in the legend of Hercules symbolise thoughts — they can only be killed with an iron arrow. Contrary to expectation, however, and helped by a chance occurrence supported by the obedience of my heartbeat, I managed to fall asleep all at once. It was a short, deep, completely dreamless sleep that was almost like a faint. I woke up a few minutes later feeling as if my heart were standing still; at the same time I felt convinced my experiment had succeeded.
I could hardly wait for morning. As usual my friend came to see me at about ten. I waited to see if he would tell me anything. In vain. He spoke about all sorts of things except any kind of nocturnal happenings. After a while I asked him shyly ‘Did you have any dreams last night, or something —’
‘Was that you?’ he broke in. I listened to his tale without interrupting him at all. He said, ‘Last night, shortly before one’ — the time corresponded to that of my experiment to the minute! — ‘I suddenly woke up, startled by a noise in the next room, as if someone were hitting the table with a flail at regular intervals. When it got louder and louder, I jumped out of bed and hurried to the other room. The blows could clearly be heard to come from the large table in the middle of the room. But there was nothing to be seen. A few minutes later my mother and the old housekeeper in their nightdresses came dashing in, terrified. After a while the noise grew quieter and quieter and eventually died away completely. We just shook our heads and went back to bed.’
That was the story told by my friend, Artur von Rimay. (He is living in Vienna at present and can confirm that what I have written here is the absolute truth.) ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this straight away?’ I asked. ‘It really is strange enough.’
‘The only explanation I can give,’ he answered hesitantly, ‘is that the strong impression the experience made on me faded while I slept afterwards. It seems so far away from me now I could almost say I just dreamt it — if I hadn’t discussed it with my mother only a few hours ago. Tell me, did you really make it happen by telekinesis?’ To prove it I handed him a piece of paper on which I had made notes during the night of everything I had done.
However strange the incident was in itself, what seemed more significant to me was the fact that it remained in the memory in a way that was disconcertingly different from, for example, an interesting natural, even an everyday experience. It would be more normal for something so exceptional to etch itself much more deeply on the memory. Would a mechanical membrane have recorded the noise of the blows on the table? Most people would say no, but I believe it would have. As far as I am concerned, similar observations much later — years later — in Levico in the South Tyrol, where I witnessed so-called ghostly manifestations, confirm that such happenings are objective and not simply subjective and certainly not peculiar hallucinations. The things I experienced in Levico — I will perhaps describe them in another place — were vivid, even fantastic, but I have to keep on visualising them in my mind’s eye if I do not want them to vanish without trace from my memory. I could put it this way: it is as if I had experienced them a century ago, and not in this life. ‘Quite, because they never actually happened,’ the superficial doubting Thomas will object. No, they did happen! Not only are there many witnesses still alive, the events were put down in writing the following day. What eliminates all doubt is the fact that physical changes took place in objects, for example a wall in a room collapsed accompanied by a kind of explosion. The wall had to be rebuilt! One of the eye witnesses has the receipt for the work. (Clearer proof can hardly be necessary, even for a professor of science!)
Despite all this there is unquestionably a faint resemblance to what we call a hallucination in both cases. The only explanation I can find is that everything we beings experience through the senses is a hallucination, as the philosophy of the Indian Upanishads maintains; everything: the external world and dreams, feverish fancies, visions and the like. The fact that objects remain even when the person perceiving them dies or goes to sleep does not prove the contrary. Anyone who can think logically will easily work it out. What people call objective and what they call subjective are so intermingled in such subtle gradations that it will always give the impression that one thing is ‘real’ and another not. If the differences are small, in our amazement we allow ourselves to be confused.
My second experience of telekinesis took place in the following way: during the first stages of the spinal illness I have mentioned I was on a train between Dresden and Pirna around midday. I suddenly remembered to my horror that in a letter to my fiancée, now my wife, which I had already posted, I had forgotten to say something that was extremely important for our future. What it was I cannot say here, since it concerned a private matter, but it was a matter of decisive importance for us. Sending a telegram was out of the question for various reasons. What could I do? I broke out in a cold sweat. It was impossible to find any way to save the situation. Then I recalled the experiment I had done with my friend Artur von Rimay. What had been successful once might work a second time. No, it simply had to work, it was a matter of all or nothing for us. So I told myself: you must appear to ‘her’, you must raise your hand in warning, must tell her by thought transference what it is about and what she must do. I therefore expressed my instructions in clear words which I visualised as written down. Then: fall asleep quickly, go in spirit to Prague and appear to her in a mirror. (I had assumed, mistakenly as it turned out, that there was a mirror in the room where she was at that moment.) The task I had set myself was so complicated, I thought it was impossible for it to succeed. The faith that was supposed to be so important was anything but present! And then, how was I supposed to fall asleep on command among all these loudly chattering passengers? I could feel my fear and despair growing, I could feel it in the way my heart was hammering wildly. Then I remembered the saying that had come to me on the stone bench by the Moldau: ‘Things come from the heart, are born of the heart and subject to the heart’ and had to suppress a cry of triumph. What need did I have of ‘faith’ and other recipes that sound as if they came from a cookery book: ‘Take a hundred eggs…’ (‘Take’, oh yes, but where from?) Calm my heart down, that was something I could do, it wasn’t some heavenly soap bubble. I sent this cheerful thought down into my chest and after just a few minutes my pulse had slowed down so much that I put it at 40 beats a minute at most. I was overcome with a wonderful sense of calm which wasn’t even disturbed when one of the other passengers asked me a question. I pretended to be asleep and shortly afterwards I fell into a genuine, deep sleep. A few minutes later I woke. As in the previous case, I had no memory of whether the experiment had succeeded or not. What I did have, however, was such a feeling of triumph that any further doubt or worry was impossible. I called up all sorts of doubts because I was interested to see if they would come. In that situation nothing would have been more natural than for them to fall on me like wild beasts. Strangely enough, it was as if they had been exterminated. There is an inner certainty which cannot be anything other than the consequence of something that has become irrevocable fact in one’s sleep. This inner certainty we can call ‘living’ faith and everything one believes in that way will inevitably happen. It is, however, a most profound error to imagine it will work the other way round and one can make something happen through faith. Anyone who thinks that is confusing cause and effect!
As soon as I was back in Prague, I hurried off to see my fiancée. The thought transfer had worked perfectly. She told me, ‘In the afternoon at the time you said, about half an hour after lunch, I had lain down on the divan and gone to sleep. Suddenly I felt I was being shaken and woke up. My eye fell on a polished cupboard beside the sofa. In its shiny surface I saw you standing there, a figure about eighteen inches high. You had your hand raised in warning. Immediately after that you’d vanished again. I racked my brains to work out what it was you wanted, but I couldn’t. One hour later it occurred to me that I was to go down to the entrance hall and wait for the postman. When he came, I took a letter from him. I was just in time, otherwise it would have fallen into the hands of someone for whom it was not intended.’
There are two main aspects that make this case particularly interesting: there was no mirror in the room, so I appeared in the shiny polish of a piece of furniture; that meant I had thought about what I was doing and used my reason. If I had left my body, as a spiritualist would assume, such purposeful action would not have been that remarkable. However, that explanation does not seem very likely to me. One point against it is that as a reflection I wasn’t dressed the same as in the train, I was wearing a white coat instead, the way ordinary people or children imagine ghosts. Moreover the Shabhavas, an Indian sect of very ancient origin who follow a meticulously designed method in order to be able to leave their bodies, say that when one really leaves one’s body physically it results in rigor mortis and one’s limbs turn icy cold. The body of the person concerned cannot come back to life on its own, someone else must do that by massaging their skin and placing some hot dough on the top of their head. Something of the kind happened with the fakir Hari Das, whom Dr Honigberger wrote about some 50 years ago. Now it is absolutely out of the question that I should have fallen into a state of catalepsy on the train; my fellow passengers would have been bound to have noticed.
The second striking aspect is that my instructions were not transferred to my fiancée’s thoughts in exactly the way I had intended. If that had been the case, it would have all gone wrong. Instead, she acted correctly, let us say from instinct; in a way she corrected my plan. Another oddity is that when she woke up on the sofa, she wasn’t immediately aware of what she should do. It looks as if the thoughts that had been transferred were first of all processed inside her, below the threshold of consciousness. Does that not suggest that many of the things that ‘occur’ to us and impel us to act are completely alien in origin, while we imagine we are the ones who decide whether to act or not? In the magnificent Indian epic, the Bhagavadgita, that must go into greater detail about yoga than any other book, it says, ‘Every deed that happens here, happens through nature’s law. “I am the doer of this deed,” is vain and idle prattle.’A pity the book is not read in school, young people would derive far more profit from it than what is intended by making them read the Iliad.
In my opinion the incident I have described is a case of telesuggestion similar to what happens in the physical realm with radiotelegraphy. It employed the contents of the imagination of the receiver, that is the belief, either hereditary or impressed on her since childhood, that an ‘apparition’ must always be clothed in white.
The process of thought transfer such as that described above presupposes the existence of an organ in human beings which enables the telegraphy to take place. Which organ is it? Are there in fact two organs, one the antenna and the other the receiver? Given our present state of knowledge, it is impossible to answer that question. The Theosophists say (they clearly picked the idea up somewhere, probably in India) that the pineal gland in the brain is the organ that performs both functions. I cannot help feeling that it is the heart that is the transmitter. Whenever in an experiment I succeeded in capturing thoughts that had been sent to me, I had the definite feeling the process was taking place in my brain and it was as if I were producing the thought myself. From that I concluded that the receiving organ must be the cerebral cortex and not the pineal gland. It has always seemed odd to me that in anatomy the cerebral cortex has the strange Latin name pia mater. I have still not managed to find who invented this term but it was obviously — or probably — the same person as the one who christened the lower section of the spinal cord the sacral plexus.10 It would be worth getting to the bottom of this, as it could possibly be a key to the system and origin of the method of the abovementioned Shabhavas, which is closely connected with Hatha Yoga. The Shabhavas base their method on written records called Agamas, which are said to be much older than the Vedas, though our scholars maintain that the Agamas are a much later product of the human mind and show evidence of degeneration due to the ‘superstition’ they contain. I cannot get over the suspicion that such scholars are only too happy to present something — unchecked — as showing signs of degeneration simply because it contains things which they do not understand or which do not fit in with their ideas. To me the Agamas seem to be the ruins of txt]ancient secret knowledge, long since distorted and half forgotten. It is indisputable that traces of the Agamas are contained in Mahayama Buddhism and it is possible that they derive from the ancient Tibetan Bhon religion and with that from Central China. From what I have heard, the latest research in this area confirms what I have always instinctively assumed.
The Agamas teach that there are seven centres of perception and receptivity to magic in the human organism. A particularly boneheaded Indian ass with a materialist outlook, the ‘Reformer’ Dayananda, refused to take that on trust and, determined to find out whether it was true or not himself, cut up a corpse with a butcher’s knife. And, lo and behold, he found nothing. — Who’s that laughing? Are there blockheads like that over here too? — These centres, which are called chakras or lotuses, are said to be situated in the spinal cord, the lowest in the sacral plexus (!), the highest above the crown of the head (!!). (Dayananda, God rest his soul, did not find that either; he probably forgot to cut open the air above the corpse.) The Reverend Leadbeater, a highly dubious gentleman and current head of the Theosophical Society, brought the Agamas, which would hardly have been known over here until then, to Europe. Since he did not name the source, his unsuspecting disciples took them as Leadbeater’s home-grown wisdom, which renewed their faith as adepts in him. Dr Rudolf Steiner, the founder of the Anthroposophical movement, brought them to Germany. Whether he knew the source, I could not say. The Shabhavas use the doctrine solely to leave their bodies. They do this by first of all concentrating their thoughts on the lowest nerve plexus, then, after they have had certain visions which tell them that the first stage is complete, they move up to the next chakra and so on until they break through the skull and are out in the open. As an outward sign of the final success of the experiment, the body falls into rigor mortis. Reading this, one cannot help thinking that it must be nothing more than a complicated, if probably also very practical method of initiating and carrying through a process of autosuggestion. The hatha yogis, who base themselves on the Pradipika and not on the Asama books, are also familiar with this process; they call it ‘drawing up the kundalini’ (power of the snake). It is probably through a superficial understanding of this word that the snake charmers of Asia and Egypt hit upon the idea of training vipers for public entertainment. The Buddha says somewhere, ‘I draw a finer body out of my body, just as a child draws the juicy stalk out of the coarser exterior.’ He too obviously knew and practised the procedure!
The Shabhavas claim one has different visions according to which chakra one is concentrating on. One of the first visions, they say, is to think one is riding up into paradise on a white horse. Since, as is well known, Mohammad also had the same experience, one could well assume that the corresponding chakra in his body — perhaps through a lesion of the spinal cord caused by a fall, possibly by the epilepsy he suffered from — was ‘brought to life’. A Shabhava would hardly have set himself up as a prophet if that had happened to him, but, of course, Mohammad had not been initiated in the Agamas, he was just a theist.
It does not sound very likely that purely external injuries to the spine could cause people to see visions and, looked at superficially, it is grist to the mill of those who incline to a mechanistic view of the world. But it does seem occasionally to be the case. A friend of mine, a keen footballer and a materialist to the point of absurdity, received such a violent kick in the back during a game in Birmingham that he was in severe pain for months. He told me — and he is an extremely truthful person — that soon afterwards he started to have strange hallucinations. Especially at night when he was walking through deserted streets, he saw female figures shrouded in white who were so clear he often wondered if they were people dressed up in costume. They blocked his way and most of the time he spread his arms and pushed himself into the walls of the buildings. When I asked him what had gone through his mind when he saw these apparitions, he gave the, for me, significant, answer: ‘Nothing.’ I suspect that it was not the physical injury that produced the visions, but a mental process. Anyone who has pain in one particular place in their body will automatically think of that place; that is, they will in a way be carrying out the same concentration of thought as a Shabhava does in a conscious and purposeful manner.
Therese Neumann from Konnersreuth, who has recently become widely known as a stigmatic, sustained curvature of the spine from carrying heavy loads and suffered from it for a long time, perhaps even still does, I couldn’t say. One day the mysterious process of crucifixion began, repeating itself every Friday with blood coming from her eyes and the wounds on her hands. Moreover she has not taken any food for a long time, allegedly for a whole year. That kind of thing is said of Catholic saints. It is, of course, possible that one day Frau Neumann will be ‘exposed’ whether with good reason or not is neither here nor there, ‘they’ very often expose things that don’t fit in with their ideas, but that doesn’t mean the hundreds of authenticated cases of this type never happened. Devout people will see the ‘Therese Neumann case’ as a miracle, or even as proof that Jesus of Nazareth really was crucified. Someone who practises yoga will say it is a symptom of one or the other chakra being brought to life. He would even say — at least, I would say it, even though I am not a Shabhava: The deeper significance of the Biblical story of the crucifixion, no matter whether it actually took place or not, is similar to that of Mohammad riding to paradise on Berrak, the white horse. (Don’t hesitate to accuse me of impiety, if you like. However, it is not impiety if I express my opinion so frankly.)
In the course of my extensive study of all kinds of books, which I pursued with particular assiduity in my younger years, I came across a volume entitled Der Schlüssel zur Geisterwelt (The Key to the Spirit World11) written in the middle of the last century by a man called Kerning. The writings of this man, whose real name was Krebs and who was a tenor and a Freemason, are completely unknown to scholars investigating the history of mysticism, even though he was a man of whom posterity will definitely take note. Kerning’s books are deliberately written in such a way that the layman cannot but think the author was a child or weak in the head. Kerning’s teaching or, to be more precise, hints, are so clearly reminiscent of the doctrine of the chakras, that one could believe he had studied the Agamas. In his day, however, that was completely impossible, since no one in the Western countries had even heard of the Agamas. Moreover Kerning himself gives his source: the Freemasons’ ritual! Just as certain letters play an important, mysterious role in the doctrine of the chakras and their awakening, they do so in the ritual of the Freemasons as well. As far as I know, no one has ever given an interpretation of them, at least not an acceptable one. Kerning claims to have discovered how to use them in order to bring about what I call the ‘transformation of the blood’: one has to murmur them to oneself, like a litany! That is, he prescribes a similar way to my late guide, J…! Remarkable! J… could neither read nor write, knew nothing of Kerning when he started out, and despite that hit upon the same system ‘by himself’. This clearly contradicts the generally accepted explanation for such happenings, namely that knowledge can only be transmitted by word of mouth or by reading the records. Knowledge whose preservation is important for mankind and for its progress can perhaps lie hidden for a thousand years, but it cannot be erased. Some‘where’ and somehow the seed will be preserved and will sprout and flower when the time is come. Let militaristic fools and fanatics such as Calif Omar, who set fire to the library of Alexandria and destroyed it because: ‘If the books say the same as the Koran, they are superfluous; if they say something different, they are pernicious’, continue with their furious assaults on shadows on the wall. All they will do is leave a shameful memorial to themselves; the light cannot be extinguished, it lives on in our blood.
Among his many books, Kerning wrote one called Testament.12 I edited it many years ago under the pseudonym of Kama, Arch Censor of the Royal Oriental Order of the Sat B’hai (a very interesting, but equally sterile occult secret order I belonged to at the time). Kerning had bequeathed the manuscript to the father of my late friend, Count Leiningen-Billighausen, who gave it to me. The content of this book is exceedingly significant and instructive for anyone with practical involvement in yoga, but also very dangerous. When I made it publicly available, I was not aware of this danger, otherwise I would never have had it printed. Fortunately it has more or less sunk without trace; I can’t even remember who published it. Like the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, it teaches breathing exercises, only in a much more profound — and perhaps even completely wrong — way!
Since Kerning had no other source available than the Freemasons’ ritual, it seems obvious that that must contain an ancient esoteric doctrine, which is a closed book to present-day Freemasons. Following that up might might yield some interesting results for a competent researcher. Even the most intensive searches for the origins of Freemasonry have not gone back more than a few hundred years. Up to the present the legend that it is immeasurably old has remained just that: a legend.
Kerning was a theist, but of a more subtle nature than other mystics. He was spared ecstasies and transports throughout his life. On the other hand he was a metaphysician through and through and regarded such things as clairvoyance as perfectly natural processes in which he was convinced one could train oneself. His system, which is almost always only hinted at and, probably intentionally, never clearly described, can be summarised in a few words roughly as follows: a person’s innermost being (probably the ‘other’ Coué talks about) only speaks to the outer person through vague presentiments, a sense of approaching danger, instinct and so on. Never, or rarely and then only in people who have the gift from birth, through direct speech. The consequence is that we are often — mostly even — led astray, for we frequently experience a feeling of anxiety, brought on by physical discomfort, and then wrongly interpret it as a warning. Such ‘deception’ by feeling is, I am sure, the reason why over the centuries mankind has turned away from instinct, as if it were a will-o’-the’wisp leading us astray. Very much to our disadvantage! We have kept away from dangerous marshes but exchanged them for the arid, stony ground of an all-too-sober, unsatisfying rational life.
Kerning wanted to put an end to the uncertainty of vague feelings; he said this could only be done if one could create an infallible means of communication between the outer and the inner person (today we call this inner person the subconscious). This would develop spontaneously, he went on, if one murmured certain letters — eleven if I remember rightly — or, especially, the word ‘I’, to oneself for long enough. (In Vedic writings it says that anyone who has murmured the sacred syllable Om so many billion times will be rewarded with ‘release’.) By this, Kerning says, our inner being will learn step by step to speak in words, removing the need for transfer by feeling and replacing it with a more reliable method. He called it ‘the inner word’ just like my former ‘guide’.
His breathing exercises were aimed at achieving union with the cosmos; it would speak, he maintained, to anyone who had mastered the exercise.
The Hatha Yoga Pradipika discusses breathing, something our medical science has ignored to this day. In the Pradipika it says that as long as a person breathes alternately through the right and left nostril, he will remain an ordinary mortal subject to an inevitable karma; in that respect then, his will is not free! If, on the other hand, he succeeds in forcing his breath into the susumna — the spinal cord! — then he will become free, omniscient and a magician of high degree who can accomplish everything he wishes. (Since Raja Yoga expressly demands that every selfish wish must have been burnt long before, one might think such omnipotence must be pathetic. However, Raja Yoga clearly takes it for granted that there is a central ‘I’ that absorbs all the monads at the end of their way to Him, transforming every individual wish into a single one.) The present yogis of India and Tibet take this forcing of the breath into the spinal cord literally; they force themselves to hold their purely physical breath until they fall unconscious or, to put it more precisely, into a trance. Anyone can discover what a horrendous effort it takes to achieve this simply by trying it themself. First of all, I was told, sweat appears, then foam forms on one’s skin and, finally, levitation occurs. I got as far as the formation of foam and no farther.
For many years I believed that pranayama (the technical Indian expression for breath control) was simply a recipe that had to be followed physically, word for word. Even today I do not doubt that used in that way it will produce astonishing results — in the mediumist, spiritualist area, I imagine, for observation of the mediums with whom I came into contact showed every time that their breathing was disturbed as soon as they fell into a trance. The way to true salvation is certainly not through simply holding one’s breath. Trance is the separation or tearing apart of consciousness and not the ‘union’ indicated in the very word ‘yoga’; it is a step in the wrong direction! In the Raja Yoga compendium, Patanjali, which I mentioned earlier, the path goes in the opposite direction, not starting out from breathing as the cause, but from mental concentration. Once that is profound enough samadhi, a state of rapt absorption, is attained and as a consequence breathing stops of its own accord.
In 1914 I was visited by a young Brahmin who knew a lot about yoga but had also received a European education having studied in Oxford. When I asked him what his opinion of pranayama was, I was surprised to hear him say that air from the atmosphere could, indeed, get into the spinal cord if it could find no way out of the tightly closed lungs. When I objected that that was an anatomical impossibility, he merely shrugged his shoulders. Even if he is right, I believe it can never be ordinary air; possibly the absorption of oxygen in the lungs leads to the release of one of the recently discovered noble gases, for example helium or argon or one still unknown, which then penetrates the spinal cord? That is just a guess, of course, though there is some possible support for my arbitrary assumption in the fact that the Indian word prana means not only breath but also ‘life force’.
What Lall — that was the name of my Indian friend — said made such an impression on me, especially since he assured me it came from the lips of a genuine yogi, whom he had found after a long search, that I decided to take up the Hatha breathing exercises I had broken off in my youth. I found that I still could not manage to hold my breath for more than two and a half minutes. I was about to give up the exercises when one day I had a strange experience: I was already sweating from the incredible exertion of trying to keep holding my breath for three minutes when the horrific ‘death shudder’ started. Unable to hold my breath any longer, I tried to breathe out. For a moment I had a remarkable lightness of feeling and to my great astonishment I could not breathe out, but had to breathe in! The air in my chest had disappeared completely. As if it had been sucked in or absorbed by other organs. But my thorax had not sunk at all, as one would have expected, but was blown up or, rather, was pressing out as at the beginning. I was so astonished by the phenomenon that for a moment I almost lost control of my senses. Presumably as a result of this inner turmoil, nothing further happened, except that I breathed in, as if gripped by a convulsion, and thus somehow, in a way I was not aware of, released the bizarre tension in my thorax.
Once I had more or less got over my astonishment, I told myself that I had probably exhaled without realising. Later I repeated the experiment, determined to observe myself closely this time. For a long time I was unsuccessful, for to hold one’s breath for two and a half, not to mention three minutes, it is essential — for me at least — not only to act on the lungs with one’s physical muscles but also to ‘stop one’s thoughts’ in a particular way. Now is it hardly possible to fix one’s thoughts and observe oneself at the same time. Still, I believe I convinced myself, when the disappearance of the air from my lungs occurred once more, that I had indeed not breathed out. My friend Lall had expressly warned me against breathing exercises; they always ended in incurable disease, he said, or death before one’s body was ready for it. Not knowing how to prepare my body, I decided, despite his warning, to try to find out through my own efforts whether I was ready. So I started off with the aforementioned exercises, just in case. However, I abruptly broke them off, for insistent warnings began to float in my consciousness in the form of unequivocal visionary images. They came a little too late. I immediately suffered from such a striking lack of imagination and of the ability to work as a writer, that I felt I had been mentally robbed. For a long time I couldn’t write anything at all. I was so lethargic that for months I couldn’t bring myself to leave the house; I sat in an armchair from morning to evening, brooding. I felt tired of life and it gnawed at me until I was almost in despair. In addition I felt unbearably thirsty. Diabetes? I asked myself. I didn’t have the courage to have a medical examination. What despicable cowardliness we humans are capable of!
Then my wife urged me to go to the doctor. I didn’t want to, so I went to the chemist. Blood sugar level 8%! A nice mess I’d got myself into! Especially for a hatha yogi who was supposed to become free of all illnesses. And 8%! The Reichsbank can afford such outrageous interest, but not a writer. There was nothing for it — surely destiny was making fun of me — but to eat humble pie and go to the doctor. For two years I followed his advice and lived on nothing but blotting paper, so to speak. True, the sugar stopped, but my weight dwindled too. You’ll be able to levitate after all, I mocked myself. Just a few dozen kilograms less and it’ll be easy. Should I start the breathing exercises again? I asked myself. Perhaps I gave up too soon? Once more a warning from my innermost being. I decided therefore at least to give some thought as to whether there might be a more profound meaning behind Hatha Yoga than the mechanical-seeming surface sense. Gradually it began to dawn on me: the breathing exercises must be seen in a completely different way. After a few months of trials I got to the real meaning.
Since then I believe I know how the strange positions the fakirs adopt are to be understood and how their effect is to be produced. It became clear to me that they proceed according to formulas that some blind imitator cobbled together in the dim and distant past from the genuine yogis he’d come across. All he’d copied was the outward show. Why does this or that fakir spend his whole life standing on one leg? Why does another hang, head downwards, from the branch of a tree and stay like that for days? Why does a third press his thumb into the palm of his hand until the fingernail grows through the flesh? I imagine I have found the key: standing motionless on one leg — the stylites did something similar (without knowing why, either!) — is a balance exercise. And why exercise balance? I didn’t work out that final puzzle straight away. I solved it by performing the exercise. Naturally I wobbled this way and that, but then — initially it was scarcely noticeable — the sensation of a ‘union’ arose; it is difficult to describe, but I have no other word for it: of a union with myself! Soon I could produce this remarkable sensation without having to stand up. The memory alone reawakened it. And by awakening that strange feeling of union I finally managed to get my diabetes to start to disappear, so that today I can live almost the same life, with no special diet, as a healthy person.
To be quite honest, I have to mention that shortly before I was cured I happened to take a medicine which was not aimed at the diabetes itself — and it has so far never been prescribed for that purpose — but for a tedious side effect of my diabetes. (If any diabetic would like to try it, it is called Nujol.) It could be that this medicine contributed to my cure, but I do not really believe that myself. The immensely beneficial effect of the balance exercise in all respects — in every last respect, and that is putting it mildly — is so extraordinary that I cannot bring myself to describe it here for fear of weakening the effect of my general remarks in advance. Getting rid of an illness is the least I believe the exercise is capable of.
How a simple balancing exercise can produce such great effect is the question that will spring to mind. An experienced rock climber with a good head for heights also has a true sense of balance and yet he will get ill at times. Of course, if it were only a matter of balance, the objection would be justified. But it isn’t that simple. Something additional must come ‘from above’, as my late ‘guide’ used to say. Not ‘grace’, no, certainly not that. Destiny doesn’t go in for favouritism. I would like to put it figuratively: our inner person — the Masked Figure hidden, separated from us, alien, totally alien to us in our everyday consciousness — stands upright inside us; it is the spinal cord, the susumna, which is what yoga is all about. Our outer person is separated from it because it is standing askew, ‘askew’ in some sense or other to our inner person. That is why they do not coincide. To put it another way: the broken sword, that is the person with their consciousness limited to earthly things, is not broken crosswise, but lengthwise. (Is there a version of the legend in which Siegfried’s sword is broken lengthwise?) I realised that the purpose of my life was to achieve union, both consciously and instinctively, with the Masked Figure: ‘the Pilot wearing the cloak of invisibility’ I once called it in a story. Whether that is the purpose of everyone’s life, I would not venture to say; it looks as if most people are, for the moment, quite content to head mindlessly for the sea to spawn, like the eels. I can only guess at how my union with the Masked Figure will develop. Such processes move at a very slow pace, stage by stage, and they last for years and years. No one should deceive themself into thinking they have been successful until they have spent a long time testing out the things I have given as examples. Nor would I insist that my experiment is the only hint as to how to go about it. On the contrary, I believe everyone should find out for themselves what the right method is for them. Everyone is ‘ill’ and split in their consciousness in a different way.
Dreams can often give a hint as to how each individual should proceed in this. Before I got the exercise of finding my balance so that it suited me, I had a significant dream, which was repeated for several nights and for that reason attracted my attention. Dreams are nothing other than visions the sleeping person has; visions that I had and still have are waking dreams and nothing else. In both the sightlines of the eyes shift! Humans and animals have their eyeballs turned upwards when they sleep. Dreams and visions are pointless if we do not learn to train ourselves so that they become our guides. Life itself is pointless if it does not teach us in which direction we should steer the ship of our existence. It is easier than many people think to train yourself to have dreams that are full of meaning. It just takes perseverance, a refusal to give up, a firm, once-and-for-all decision not to stop, ‘even if it should take a million years’. You have to go to bed with the obstinate question in your mind: what meaning will the dream I am expecting have? Children go to bed wanting to dream something nice and their mothers might well encourage this sentimental approach. If you do as I advise, the usual confused tangle of dreams will probably continue for a while, but then order will be established: the Masked Figure is beginning to speak. Mostly in symbols, sometimes however, if a person has a special talent for it, in clear, unmistakable images or even words. If the words are spoken by a figure you see in your dream then you must be extremely wary! It could be a case of a mediumist phenomenon, as deceptive as everything of that kind. Words and acoustic communications in dreams must, if they are to be trusted, sound as if you were saying them to yourself. Anyone who is on the right path to ‘union’ will never see the Masked Figure; how could one see something that is, basically, oneself? It is true that people have sometimes seen their own double — Goethe for example — but a double like that is not the Masked Figure, it is something quite different, which I have no reason to go into in more detail here.
I dreamt, then, that I was standing on the top of a mountain, the summit of which was just a few square metres of wet, slippery grass. I had an unpleasant feeling of dizziness and had gone down on all fours, like an animal, for fear of losing my footing. I didn’t dare stand up. This dream was repeated several times. Its message was clear, but for a long time I could not see the practical application. I took it in a much too superficial manner, thought it was a trivial warning about how to behave in everyday life. It was that as well, for at that time I was in a situation where I didn’t quite know how to behave. However, the deeper meaning of the dream was: practise in your waking life what you see shown here figuratively. It will take you one step closer to union with your innermost being, which stands eternally upright. Such instructions alone are of genuine value. Anyone who interprets them in too shallow a manner should consider the fairy tale of the soldier who first of all found copper coins in the cave, then silver and finally gold. The more often the dream was repeated, the greater the efforts I made to stand up on the slippery peak, but I just could not manage it.
Then the dream changed: I was in a room with only one exit, which was directly opposite me. I wanted to go to the door but to do so I would have had to go past a tall pedestal with a huge, venomous snake on it, curled up and ready to strike the moment I came near. This dream was also repeated several times and, as with the first, I could not conquer my fear. There are myths, especially of Oriental origin and in their content occult in the best sense of the word, which say that people are gripped by an unconquerable feeling of fear when a particular stage of their inner development is approaching — like the fear I felt in the dream of the snake. It eventually started to affect my waking consciousness as well and so badly that I decided to try the exercise of getting my heart to stand still, since all the rational methods I employed to calm myself down failed completely. (‘Aha!’ the doctor would say, ‘the side effects of diabetes,’ but he would only be half right.) In this case making my heart stand still produced no effect either. Only when I did the balancing exercise did the feeling of anxiety disappear. Whenever the exercise was successful I monitored my heartbeat — every time it slowed down of its own accord! I felt I had taken a significant step forward, had moved one level higher on the path to the control and transformation of the blood. Strangely enough, this was accompanied by positive changes in my external life: agreeable (instead of the previous disagreeable) developments occurred, as if by chance. By chance! It was a chain of events fitting in with each other in such a remarkable way that the word ‘chance’ seems a cowardly disparagement to please the sceptic. It confirmed the suspicion I had always had that one could change one’s destiny if one only had the right key. I had long since learnt to doubt whether the key was work — work in the sense the layman understands it. Throughout my life I have achieved as good as nothing through work; even though I would not say I was lazy, indolent or incompetent, any advance I made was always through good fortune alone. The only true key to happiness, well-being, health and the like is union with the Masked Figure. That is the one we call providence. That is the one who helps us when our need is greatest. Not some god on his throne above the clouds. Why does the help always come at the last moment? (Everyone has probably had the strange experience that it is always ‘at the last moment’ that ‘something happens’ because we have the wrong (!) kind of self-assurance and not the right kind that comes naturally from becoming one with the Masked Figure. The wrong self-assurance must first of all be pushed aside if the right kind is to appear. This pushing aside is done by our desperate need, unfortunately seldom with lasting effect, for our old self-assurance soon returns. To interpret a story from the Bible symbolically: Christ is asleep in the boat and his disciples wake him when they see the waves are getting alarmingly high.
There is a German saying that adversity teaches you how to pray; a person who has grasped yoga can add: even greater adversity teaches you to forget prayer. Anyone who is pleading for something will have the same experience as I did in my dream of the summit and the snake. I will recount an incident, that happened to me, which proves that dreams can at times speak clearly and not only in symbols. In 1922 I bought an old car. As often happens, the seller assured me the vehicle was in perfect order; not even his conscience was in perfect order. The car looked horrible and I decided to have the bodywork redone; until then it stayed in a garage to be checked over. When that was done I was going to drive it to a repair shop. Then my wife dreamt that we were driving there and the car suddenly overturned in the ditch on the right; our daughter was dead, she and our son hurt and I seriously injured. Exactly the same the dream was repeated six or seven times. I got my wife to go over the situation in the dream in detail. She described the landscape: ‘And we’re on a steep slope, with trees on either side, you’re driving, our son beside you, my daughter and me in the back when suddenly the car tips, falls down to the right, overturns and we’re all underneath.’
I found the matter more and more disturbing and didn’t know what to do. The day was approaching when I was to drive the car to the repair shop. I thought it over and had a harebrained idea: I would trick fate. I decided to change things from the way my wife had seen them in her dream. I rang an acquaintance and asked if he would be good enough to drive my car to Garmisch the next day, there were various reasons why I was unwilling to do it myself. My thinking was that if I wasn’t at the wheel myself I was in a way circumventing the prophecy in the dream. (Pretty stupid, the reader will say.) For the same reason I also decided not to take my daughter with us. My acquaintance was happy to do me the favour and it was all agreed.
At six next morning my acquaintance rang to say that unfortunately he had to call off: during the night a boil had appeared on his neck which was so painful he couldn’t come. I scratched my head: so fate was determined to be right, was it, playing a game of chess with me and thwarting my cunning scheme? In that case we definitely are going to drive there! We’ll see who comes out on top, my friend! I telephoned the repair shop in Garmisch and asked the owner to send his driver. After a lot of shilly-shallying — the man couldn’t come, that kind of thing — I got what I wanted and was promised the driver would arrive in Starnberg by the next train. I went straight to the garage where the car was kept and asked the mechanic to check everything over again.
‘Everything’s okay,’ he replied.
‘Please have a look at the nearside wheels,’ I asked him, telling him my wife had dreamt the car had toppled over to the right; perhaps there was a fault in the wheels on that side.
Very reluctantly the mechanic obeyed and removed the rear nearside wheel. ‘What’s this!’ he suddenly exclaimed. ‘The axle stub’s broken. How on earth could I have overlooked that? I could bet it wasn’t like that before.’
‘Could that make the car crash?’ I asked. ‘Could the wheel fall off?’
‘No, it would never fall off,’ he replied, ‘but it could suddenly lock; if you happened to be driving fast, you could lose control of the steering and naturally you would skid and crash.’
Just at that moment the driver from Garmisch arrived; I showed him the fault and asked whether he was still prepared to drive us. After a long discussion with the mechanic, he said yes, he was. I sat next to him, on the left, my son and wife in the back, thus going against the dream image. We set off at snail’s pace. One hour later we were approaching Weilheim when my wife suddenly tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, ‘We’re coming to the area I dreamt of.’
There it was: a downward slope, trees on both sides. ‘Go even more slowly’, I told the driver.
‘Why? We’re going slowly enough as it is, 25 kilometres an hours at most.’
I insisted: ‘No. Ten at the most, please.’
The car was just crawling along. Suddenly the driver whispered to me, ‘Can you hear something? What’s that grinding noise at the back?’
The next moment the car slumped down with a jolt. The driver slammed on the brakes and the car stopped, tilted to the right. A miracle that it hadn’t overturned! Close by on the right-hand side was a deep ditch.
We got out. The wheel had not come off the axle, but the rim had detached itself — a fault no one would have expected — and, with the tyre and tube still on, was disappearing down the road like a goblin, until it rolled into the ditch.
Could one not truly say: We outwitted fate?
If one does not simply take a superficial view of this incident but looks at what is behind it, it becomes so interesting one could erect a whole system of philosophy on it. Even the way destiny insisted on trying to get its own way by — to put it crudely — ‘making’ my acquaintance ill during the night before the journey, so that I would have to drive myself, etc. I am sure destiny has been similarly thwarted at other times over the centuries, causing a stir. No wonder, then, that the belief arose that malign but stupid beings interfere in our lives. Perhaps, who knows, those who support such ‘superstition’ are not entirely wrong. Incidentally, the car had a strange fate. It was burnt in a fire that broke out in the repair shop in Garmisch so that only part of it was still usable.
In 1896 I had an experience, the inner workings and causes of which are so difficult to see that one would have to construct a far-reaching system to explain it completely. It is not connected with the dreams I have been discussing, but more with commands that one takes with one into one’s deep sleep — rather like the case where I appeared to my wife by telepathy. I will describe it here simply because it was so odd.
At the time I was in regular correspondence with an Indian swami who lived in Mayavati in the Himalaya area and edited a little newspaper — Prabudha Bharata — devoted to the Ramakrishna movement. In the course of our correspondence the swami described a Tibetan method, involving magic, of compelling a thief by telepathy to return a stolen object. The method consisted of drawing a certain geometrical figure on paper before going to bed, imagining a vision of the desired object in the middle of it until one could see it clearly in one’s mind’s eye, then burning the piece of paper, imagining that would send the geometrical figure into the astral realm, where it would capture, so to speak, the stolen or lost object.
When the swami’s letter reached me, I had just lost a meerschaum cigar holder; I suspected it had been stolen by my office messenger. In the way that we often become obsessed with recovering things of no value, I spent six weeks desperately looking for the cigar holder. Out of interest I followed the instructions the Indian had sent me. I did not in the least believe it would work, it was basically curiosity that led me to follow the instructions carefully. A few days passed — I had long since forgotten the matter — and, as usual, I set off home at lunchtime. It was my habit to do this at one o’clock, but that day I didn’t leave until two, without there being any reason for the delay. Also on that day I did not take my usual short cut, a public passage through a building, but chose to go by a very busy, wide street, even though it was farther. I had no thought of the meerschaum holder. I could not go particularly quickly because of the crowd, so I walked along behind two men who were in lively conversation. I wasn’t listening and, anyway, they were speaking Czech, so I wouldn’t have understood. Suddenly one of them stopped, forcing me to stop for a moment. He took an object out of his pocket and held it out to the other. It was a black leather case that seemed strangely familiar. He opened it and the other looked inside. To my immense astonishment, I saw that it was my cigar holder. I wondered what to do. By this time the two had separated. I followed one of them, wrongly assuming he had taken the case. When we reached a deserted street corner, I stopped him and told him I had lost the cigar holder and since I was fond of it, I would like to buy it back from him. I assured the man, who was fairly shabbily dressed, that I wouldn’t dream of demanding it back for nothing. As I handed him a tip, the man insisted I was mistaken, the other had put the case back in his pocket. Still, he told me he would get the holder for me quickly since the other man had offered to sell it to him. They were going to meet that afternoon at four, the man having offered to sell him other things, in the courtyard of an inn and he suggested I should be there too. Naturally I was there punctually. The two of them arrived a few minutes later. With an apparently innocent conversation the shabbily clad one got the other to show him the cigar holder again. When the man took it out of his pocket, I pounced like a hawk. There was a short exchange, but when the ‘finder’ realised I had no intention of taking him to the police, as he might have feared, he became extremely friendly, pocketed the money I offered with a satisfied grin and told me he had found it six weeks ago in a box of the concert hall of the Grand Hotel, where he worked as a waiter. Since no one had reported it as lost, he thought he was justified in keeping it.
Since I would have liked to find out what circumstances had made the man go along Obststrasse at two that afternoon, I asked him all sorts of questions relating to that. Naturally the waiter found that strange, perhaps even dubious; whatever the case, he became very suspicious and eventually somewhat tart, at which I took my leave of him. But at least I had recovered my cigar holder in this bizarre way. Should I take it as the effect of the Tibetan magic diagram? I wondered. It could have been a coincidence. I decided to do a second experiment. For a long time I had not been able to find a walking stick I had which was shaped like a golf club and assumed I’d left it somewhere. Once more I drew the geometrical figure and imagined the golf-club walking stick in the middle of it. The next morning the stick was lying across a chair in my apartment. The maid swore she had not put it there and no one else could tell me anything either. But of course the stick could not have been lying for weeks on the chair I used every day.
This time it could hardly have been a coincidence. I decided to try it out a third time and waited for an opportunity where a successful outcome would be almost definitely out of the question. One soon presented itself. At that time I lived close by the Moldau, in a house built onto a mill. The eastern wall was washed by a raging arm of the river which shot out from the millrace there. When pruning a pot plant one day the scissors — a very old family heirloom of curious design which came from my grandfather — fell out of the open window into the river.
This time, I thought, the Tibetan magic is surely going to fail, but I still went through with the experiment, just to see. What then happened was incredible, a sheer impossibility! I was literally shattered. One morning the scissors were back on my desk! For a moment I thought I must be going out of my mind. Then I told myself: it’s probably your memory that’s at fault and you dropped a quite different pair of scissors out of the window. I immediately went to the kitchen and asked the maid, ‘Did you put this pair of scissors on my desk’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘When?’
‘Yesterday evening, when you were out, sir.’
‘Where did you find them?
‘Johann, the miller’s apprentice, brought them. He said we’d probably dropped them in the river.’
‘But how could the fellow have got them out of the deep millrace. Was he fishing there and if so, why?’
‘No, the millrace was drained yesterday and is dry; the miller closed the sluice gate because there’s something broken on the wheel,’ the girl explained. ‘That’s probably when Jan found the scissors. I could ask him.’
I looked out of the window: there was no water in the millrace; it was full of tins and broken glass.
All that was mere chance? Impossible! Out of the question. I was so excited that on that same day I told all my friends what had happened. They as good as laughed in my face. They were naturally convinced I’d made it up. My assurances made no difference, people prefer to believe someone’s lying than to accept baffling events — the conclusions they would be compelled to draw are too uncomfortable for them.
Even today I have no real explanation of what things might have played a part in these experiences. There are possible explanations in the case of the cigar holder: telepathic vibrations could have brought the waiter and myself together at the same moment in the crowded street; remarkable enough, but still possible. In the case of the scissors that seems to be out of the question. One can hardly assume that I broke a millwheel by unconsciously using magic! And if the wheel hadn’t been broken, the miller wouldn’t have drained the millrace.
When, years later, I told my friend Lall about these experiences, he said that it had all been done by certain elemental beings. Tibetan diagrams such as the one I had been given forced them to obey. ‘Superstition, of course,’ the enlightened European will say. Call it superstition if you like, but how can it produce such astonishing effects? Naturally I tried out the method lots more times — and it always failed! Lall explained that this was because I had told other people about it, especially hostile sceptics, which I should never have done. That restored freedom to the elemental beings and the diagram lost its magic. Incidentally, the scissors suffered the same sad fate as the car: they were burnt. That is, one day they fell into the kitchen stove fire and were no longer usable. Presumably the ‘elementals’ are strict about venting their anger on objects they have been involved with.
To return to the second fakir I mentioned, the one hanging head down from a tree that I had seen in an illustration in Campbell Oman’s book. There was a picture of the fakir standing on one leg in Schmidt’s book on fakirism and, as I have said, it helped me to develop the balance exercise. It was not so easy to copy the man hanging head down and I do not think the exercise would have produced any significant effect, it was just a piece of manifest nonsense for public consumption. I can only guess at what it is meant to say but, using hints from Indian books, I would put it this way: in the course of their development through yoga a person gradually acquires a different polarity from ordinary people. Perhaps the word ‘polarity’ is inaccurate but how can I describe a process of which I know as good as nothing?
Today we have no idea whether the ancient Indians had any precise knowledge of the law of gravity, or whether Newton really was the first person to discover it. However, it is safe to assume that the old Orientals — the Chinese above all — will have wondered why all things are bound to the earth and only birds and insects can fly. Away from the ground and free! That will surely have been what they desired, at least the ascetics and yogis. And if there was then a case like that of the Catholic monk of San Vito who, it is reported, fell into a trance before thousands of people while praying and floated up to the dome of the church (there are reports of hundreds of similar cases!), then there is no doubt that primitive investigators would have pondered how something like that could be explained apart from through the intervention of a demon or a god. That will especially have been the case among the ancient Egyptians, since there the caste of priests were also the custodians of science.
It seems very likely that one or another of them would have had the idea of seeing whether hanging head down would produce results as far as levitation was concerned. Perhaps these experiments led to the popular belief that they were the real key to controlling the desired phenomena. I believe that if hanging upside down for a long time is to be successful, that will not happen through the purely mechanical execution but only if it is accompanied by spiritual notions, such as I observed in standing upright and keeping my balance. It is also possible that some fakirs practise hanging upside down to produce physiological changes caused by the rush of blood to the head. Certain other fakir exercises are aimed at increasing the flow of blood to the head, for example slowly inhaling followed by exhaling as violently as possible. It can presumably be taken as proven that these and similar violent methods serve the sole purpose of inducing trance. That is, they are steps in the opposite direction to the one someone should take if they want to go forward on the path of development.
To sum up briefly: development and advancement lie in the ever greater heightening of consciousness, not in interrupting, shifting or reducing it. Although yoga and everything that comes into that area may look like hothouse nurture, in my opinion such accelerated growth is not at all unnatural but rather the most important thing one can strive for as long as one is here on earth. ‘The sole deed that is worth accomplishing,’ as the Indian books say.
To move on to the third fakir, the one who spends his whole life with his thumb pressed into the palm of his hand until the nail grows through. Why? What did the one who first did the exercise have in mind? He certainly can’t have done it off the top of his head! The following explanation suggests itself: In earlier times and still today among savages, and even among Muslims, a madman is regarded as holy. Hystero-epilepsy gives the impression a person suffering from it is mad. As is well known, Mohammad was an epileptic. When epileptics have a fit, they turn their thumbs inwards, but not only that, they also bend their tongue backwards into their gullet. Once when I saw that happen, the question that immediately came to mind was: do fakirs also swallow their tongue? I tried to find out myself, but it was the swami in Myavati who eventually confirmed my suspicion. He wrote, ‘I am very well acquainted with this fakir sect from my time in Amritsar; they constantly perform Kechari Mudra (swallowing the tongue).’ So I was right, they copied the outward side-effects of epilepsy. I cannot say whether by that they manage to become epileptics but it is certainly not inconceivable, if one bears in mind that the opposite is possible, namely that one can bring an epileptic fit to an end by releasing the person’s thumb and forcing their tongue back into its natural position.
Patanjali’s rules for Raja Yoga indicate that even in ancient times they had discovered a law of nature which one could express roughly as follows: physiological effects can, if copied physically, create the causes which originally produced them; it is, then, possible to invert cause and effect. For example: taking slow, deep breaths results in calmness of thought; conversely, calmness of thought and concentrating one’s attention automatically results in deep breathing. This example alone is a valuable key to practical magic, though a person lacking imagination will not put it in the lock, never mind turn it.
For a while I was satisfied with the explanation that the fakir sect turned their thumbs inwards simply in order to induce epilepsy, but then I asked myself why they held their thumbnail against the palm of their hand. Natural epileptics just hold their thumbs clenched in their fist. So there was a small difference! A primitive way of producing stigmas, was the thought that suddenly occurred to me and I suspect I was on the right track. Could the exercise be related to the Jesus legend? I immediately wrote to my friend in Myavati asking how old the thumb mudra might be and whether it arose about the time of the death of Christ. The answer came a few months later: ‘I have made extensive enquiries; it was already known at the time of the Buddha and even then — several hundred years before Christ — was part of the hatha yogis’ repertoire.’ Is it then the stigmas the sect is trying to acquire and not just a state of epileptoid processes? Perhaps both. That stigmatics do not need food, neither liquid nor solid, to stay alive is something that has been established not only in the case of the present-day Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth, but also in very many earlier cases. An amazing phenomenon, for which doctors have found a very elaborate ‘explanation’, but still a phenomenon which none of those who starve themselves as a public show have been able to replicate. Their world record is 68 days fasting, but they all drank water. Clearly, therefore, with the stigmatics it must be spiritual factors that play the key role and produce that ‘transformation of the blood’. It would be wrong to think that stopping taking bodily nourishment is the highest degree of physical change brought about as a result of spiritual processes. Leading English scientists established that when the famous Scottish medium, Daniel Douglas Home, was in a trance, his height reduced or increased by more than a foot. It is only the majority of people, who have no idea what matter really is, who find that strange. Stigmas, blood issuing from the eyes etc. are naturally only side effects of the ability to live without food and not its cause. I am also firmly convinced that the aetiology of this ‘illness’ has nothing to do with the drama on Golgotha. It is simply interpreted in that way by the Church, because there is a certain similarity. An experience I had when I was still a disciple of J… encourages me in this view. As I have already said, my co-disciples showed the beginnings of stigmas. Now at the same time a friend of mine, a doctor at the Prague lunatic asylum who was not a disciple of J…, was doing yoga exercises following Patanjali, thought concentration exercises that had nothing at all to do with the Jesus legend. And lo and behold, he too developed incipient stigmas! Is not the correct conclusion the assumption that stigmas are the outward sign of a change taking place in the body that appear when a particular stage of development has been reached? A stage similar to Mohammad’s vision of the white horse. And if it really is a law of nature relating to physiology, it would explain at a stroke the point of the thumb exercise of the fakir sect: producing bodily changes.
As I have said, it is futile to attempt to influence the wheel of fate by putting one’s heart and soul into one’s outward profession. Covering the shadow on the wall with whitewash, I called it. The value of such professional keenness is no greater than that of its opposite, the life of a tramp. Unless, that is, ‘something extra comes from above’. If a manufacturer of braces makes his business more profitable by reducing his expenses, what, at best, will be the result? He will acquire a fortune which his son will inherit and his grandson squander, as is usual. What does the man get out of it? Nothing but chaff! But that doesn’t just apply to people in the braces business, it applies to everyone! Differences in value are only outward show. Seen from above, a grassy plain and an alpine forest are just patches of green. If, however, something extra comes ‘from above’ — for the braces manufacturer as for Alexander the ‘Great’ — the picture immediately changes. What was previously worthless at once becomes meaningful, a way to the goal. What I call this ‘from above’ is learning to understand what the Masked Figure intends by imposing our fate on us. Anyone who does not acquire this kind of seeing and hearing is like a child that goes to school but does not realise it should pay attention. In such cases every day is wasted. It would be better to play truant and become a tramp!
Notes
10 Meyrink is mistaken here. The pia mater is not the same as the cerebral cortex, but a soft membrane surrounding it. The name is translated from Arabic and means ‘gentle mother’ in contrast to the dura mater — ‘hard mother’.
11 English translation: J Kerning: Esoteric Education or the Unfoldment and Life of a Hero, Kessinger Publishing, 2006 (originally: Esoteric Publishing Co, Boston, 1888); it appears to be the only work by Kerning to appear in English.
12 Leipzig 1907; republished in Rarissima 1. Seltenste Dokumente der Esoterik aus vier Jahrhunderten, ed F.W. Schmitt, Sinzheim, 2003.