news. I realize clearly, without one moment’s hesitation or mistake,
the effect of the shock upon her, I perceive clearly, following and
recording, to the minutest detail, her sensations and the inner process
that takes place in her. I watch and remember, missing not one single
point.
As the corpse is brought into the house for identification I hear
the long agonizing cry, my own name pronounced, and the dull thud of
the living body falling upon the remains of the dead one. I follow
with curiosity the sudden thrill and the instantaneous perturbation
in her brain that follow it, and watch with attention the worm-like,
precipitate, and immensely intensified motion of the tubular fibers,
the instantaneous change of color in the cephalic extremity of the
nervous system, the fibrous nervous matter passing from white to bright
red and then to a dark red, bluish hue. I notice the sudden flash of
a phosphorous-like, brilliant Radiance, its tremor and its sudden
extinction followed by darkness—complete darkness in the region of
memory—as the Radiance, comparable in its form only to a human shape,
oozes out suddenly from the top of the head, expands, loses its form
and scatters. And I say to myself: “This is insanity; life-long,
incurable insanity, for the principle of intelligence is not paralyzed
or extinguished temporarily, but has just deserted the tabernacle for
ever, ejected from it by the terrible force of the sudden blow.... The
link between the animal and the divine essence is broken.”... And as
the unfamiliar term “divine” is mentally uttered _my_ “THOUGHT”—laughs.
Suddenly I hear again my far-off yet near voice pronouncing
emphatically and close by me the words ... “_why my sister has so
suddenly ceased writing_.”... And before the two final words “_to
me_” have completed the sentence, I see a long series of sad events,
immediately following the catastrophe.
I behold the mother, now a helpless, grovelling idiot, in the lunatic
asylum attached to the city hospital, the seven younger children
admitted into a refuge for paupers. Finally I see the two elder, a boy
of fifteen, and a girl a year younger, my favorites, both taken by
strangers into their service. A captain of a sailing vessel carries
away my nephew, an old Jewess adopts the tender girl. I see the events
with all their horrors and thrilling details, and record each, to the
smallest detail, with the utmost coolness.
For, mark well: when I use such expressions as “horrors,” etc., they
are to be understood as an after-thought. During the whole time of the
events described I experienced no sensation of either pain or pity. My
feelings seemed to be paralyzed as well as my external senses; it was
only after “coming back” that I realized my irretrievable losses to
their full extent.
Much of that which I had so vehemently denied in those days, owing to
sad personal experience I have to admit now. Had I been told by anyone
at that time, that man could act and think and feel, irrespective of
his brain and senses; nay, that by some mysterious, and to this day,
for me, incomprehensible power, _he_ could be transported _mentally_,
thousands of miles away from his body, there to witness not only
present but also past events, and remember these by storing them in
his memory—I would have proclaimed that man a madman. Alas, I can do
so no longer, for I have become myself that “madman.” Ten, twenty,
forty, a hundred times during the course of this wretched life of mine,
have I experienced and lived over such moments of existence, _outside
of my body_. Accursed be that hour when this terrible power was first
awakened in me! I have not even the consolation left of attributing
such glimpses of events at a distance to insanity. Madmen rave and see
that which exists not in the realm they belong to. My visions have
proved _invariably correct_. But to my narrative of woe.
I had hardly had time to see my unfortunate young niece in her new
Israelitish home, when I felt a shock of the same nature as the one
that had sent me “swimming” through the bowels of the earth, as I had
thought. I opened my eyes in my own room, and the first thing I fixed
upon by accident, was the clock. The hands of the dial showed seven
minutes and a half past five!... I had thus passed through these most
terrible experiences, which it takes me hours to narrate, _in precisely
half a minute of time_!
But this, too, was an after-thought. For one brief instant I
recollected nothing of what I had seen. The interval between the time I
had glanced at the clock when taking the mirror from the Yamabooshi’s
hand and this second glance, seemed to me merged in one. I was just
opening my lips to hurry on the Yamabooshi with his experiment, when
the full remembrance of what I had just seen flashed lightning-like
into my brain. Uttering a cry of horror and despair, I felt as though
the whole creation were crushing me under its weight. For one moment I
remained speechless, the picture of human ruin amid a world of death
and desolation. My heart sank down in anguish: my doom was closed; and
a hopeless gloom seemed to settle over the rest of my life for ever.
V
RETURN OF DOUBTS
Then came a reaction as sudden as my grief itself. A doubt arose in my
mind, which forthwith grew into a fierce desire of denying the truth of
what I had seen. A stubborn resolution of treating the whole thing as
an empty, meaningless dream, the effect of my overstrained mind, took
possession of me. Yes; it was but a lying vision, an idiotic cheating
of my own senses, suggesting pictures of death and misery which had
been evoked by weeks of incertitude and mental depression.
“How could I see all that I have seen in less than half a minute?”—I
exclaimed. “The theory of dreams, the rapidity with which the material
changes on which our ideas in vision depend, are excited in the
hemispherical ganglia, is sufficient to account for the long series of
events I have seemed to experience. In dream alone can the relations
of space and time be so completely annihilated. The Yamabooshi is for
nothing in this disagreeable nightmare. He is only reaping that which
has been sown by myself, and, by using some infernal drug, of which his
tribe have the secret, he has contrived to make me lose consciousness
for a few seconds and see that vision—as lying as it is horrid. Avaunt
all such thoughts, I believe them not. In a few days there will be a
steamer sailing for Europe.... I shall leave to-morrow!”
This disjointed monologue was pronounced by me aloud, regardless of the
presence of my respected friend the Bonze, Tamoora, and the Yamabooshi.
The latter was standing before me in the same position as when he
placed the mirror in my hands, and kept looking at me calmly, I should
perhaps say looking _through_ me, and in dignified silence. The Bonze,
whose kind countenance was beaming with sympathy, approached me as he
would a sick child, and gently laying his hand on mine, and with tears
in his eyes, said: “Friend, you must not leave this city before you
have been completely purified of your contact with the lower Daij-Dzins
(spirits), who had to be used to guide your inexperienced soul to the
places it craved to see. The entrance to your Inner Self must be closed
against their dangerous intrusion. Lose no time, therefore, my son, and
allow the holy Master yonder, to purify you at once.”
But nothing can be more deaf than anger once aroused. “The sap of
reason” could no longer “quench the fire of passion,” and at that
moment I was not fit to listen to his friendly voice. His is a face
I can never recall to my memory without genuine feeling; his, a name
I will ever pronounce with a sigh of emotion; but at that ever
memorable hour when my passions were inflamed to white heat, I felt
almost a hatred for the kind, good old man, I could not forgive him his
interference in the present event. Hence, for all answer, therefore, he
received from me a stern rebuke, a violent protest on my part against
the idea that I could ever regard the vision I had had, in any other
light save that of an empty dream, and his Yamabooshi as anything
better than an impostor. “I will leave to-morrow, had I to forfeit my
whole fortune as a penalty”—I exclaimed, pale with rage and despair.
“You will repent it the whole of your life, if you do so before the
holy man has shut every entrance in you against intruders ever on
the watch and ready to enter the open door,” was the answer. “The
Daij-Dzins will have the best of you.”
I interrupted him with a brutal laugh, and a still more brutally
phrased inquiry about the _fees_ I was expected to give the Yamabooshi,
for his experiment with me.
“He needs no reward,” was the reply. “The order he belongs to is the
richest in the world, since its adherents need nothing, for they are
above all terrestrial and venal desires. Insult him not, the good man
who came to help you out of pure sympathy for your suffering, and to
relieve you of mental agony.”
But I would listen to no words of reason and wisdom. The spirit of
rebellion and pride had taken possession of me, and made me disregard
every feeling of personal friendship, or even of simple propriety.
Luckily for me, on turning round to order the mendicant monk out of my
presence, I found he had gone.
I had not seen him move, and attributed his stealthy departure to fear
at having been detected and understood.
Fool! blind, conceited idiot that I was! Why did I fail to recognize
the Yamabooshi’s power, and that the peace of my whole life was
departing with him, from that moment for ever? But I did so fail.
Even the fell demon of my long fears—uncertainty—was now entirely
overpowered by that fiend scepticism—the silliest of all. A dull,
morbid unbelief, a stubborn denial of the evidence of my own senses,
and a determined will to regard the whole vision as a fancy of my
overwrought mind, had taken firm hold of me.
“My mind,” I argued, “what is it? Shall I believe with the
superstitious and the weak that this production of phosphorus and gray
matter is indeed the superior part of me; that it can act and see
independently of my physical senses? Never! As well believe in the
planetary ‘intelligences’ of the astrologer, as in the ‘Daij-Dzins’ of
my credulous though well-meaning friend, the priest. As well confess
one’s belief in Jupiter and Sol, Saturn and Mercury, and that these
worthies guide their spheres and concern themselves with mortals,
as to give one serious thought to the airy nonentities supposed to
have guided my ‘soul’ in its unpleasant dream! I loathe and laugh at
the absurd idea. I regard it as a personal insult to the intellect
and rational reasoning powers of a man, to speak of invisible
creatures, ‘_subjective_ intelligences,’ and all that kind of insane
superstition.” In short, I begged my friend the Bonze to spare me his
protests, and thus the unpleasantness of breaking with him for ever.
Thus I raved and argued before the venerable Japanese gentleman, doing
all in my power to leave on his mind the indelible conviction of my
having gone suddenly mad. But his admirable forbearance proved more
than equal to my idiotic passion; and he implored me once more, for the
sake of my whole future, to submit to certain “necessary purificatory
rites.”
“Never! Far rather dwell in air, rarefied to nothing by the air-pump
of wholesome unbelief, than in the dim fog of silly superstition,”
I argued, paraphrazing Richter’s remark. “I will not believe,” I
repeated; “but as I can no longer bear such uncertainty about my sister
and her family, I will return by the first steamer to Europe.”
This final determination upset my old acquaintance altogether. His
earnest prayer not to depart before I had seen the Yamabooshi once
more, received no attention from me.
“Friend of a foreign land!”—he cried, “I pray that you may not repent
of your unbelief and rashness. May the ‘Holy One’ (Kwan-On, the Goddess
of Mercy) protect you from the Dzins! For, since you refuse to submit
to the process of purification at the hands of the holy Yamabooshi,
he is powerless to defend you from the evil influences evoked by your
unbelief and defiance of truth. But let me, at this parting hour, I
beseech you, let me, an older man who wishes you well, warn you once
more and persuade you of things you are still ignorant of. May I speak?”
“Go on and have your say,” was the ungracious assent. “But let me warn
you, in my turn, that nothing you can say can make of me a believer in
your disgraceful superstitions.” This was added with a cruel feeling of
pleasure in bestowing one more needless insult.
But the excellent man disregarded this new sneer as he had all others.
Never shall I forget the solemn earnestness of his parting words, the
pitying, remorseful look on his face when he found that it was, indeed,
all to no purpose, that by his kindly meant interference he had only
led me to my destruction.
“Lend me your ear, good sir, for the last time,” he began, “learn that
unless the holy and venerable man, who, to relieve your distress,
opened your ‘soul vision,’ is permitted to complete his work, your
future life will, indeed, be little worth living. He has to safeguard
you against involuntary repetitions of visions of the same character.
Unless you consent to it of your own free will, however, you will have
to be left in the power of _Forces_ which will harass and persecute you
to the verge of insanity. Know that the development of ‘Long Vision’
(clairvoyance)—which is accomplished _at will_ only by those for whom
the Mother of Mercy, the great Kwan-On, has no secrets—must, in the
case of the beginner, be pursued with help of the air Dzins (elemental
spirits) whose nature is soulless, and hence wicked. Know also that,
while the Arihat, ‘the destroyer of the enemy,’ who has subjected and
made of these creatures his servants, has nothing to fear; he who
has no power over them becomes their slave. Nay, laugh not in your
great pride and ignorance, but listen further. During the time of the
vision and while the inner perceptions are directed towards the events
they seek, the Daij-Dzin has the seer—when, like yourself, he is an
inexperienced tyro—entirely in its power; and for the time being _that
seer is no longer himself_. He partakes of the nature of his ‘guide.’
The Daij-Dzin, which directs his inner sight, keeps his soul in durance
vile, making of him, while the state lasts, a creature like itself.
Bereft of his divine light, man is but a soulless being; hence during
the time of such connection, he will feel no human emotions, neither
pity nor fear, love nor mercy.”
“Hold!” I involuntarily exclaimed, as the words vividly brought
back to my recollection the indifference with which I had witnessed
my sister’s despair and sudden loss of reason in my “hallucination.”
“Hold!... But no; it is still worse madness in me to heed or find any
sense in your ridiculous tale! But if you knew it to be so dangerous
why have advised the experiment at all?”—I added mockingly.
“It had to last but a few seconds, and no evil could have resulted from
it, had you kept your promise to submit to purification,” was the sad
and humble reply. “I wished you well, my friend, and my heart was nigh
breaking to see you suffering day by day. The experiment is harmless
when directed by _one who knows_, and becomes dangerous only when the
final precaution is neglected. It is the ‘Master of Visions,’ he who
has opened an entrance into your soul, who has to close it by using the
Seal of Purification against any further and deliberate ingress of....”
“The ‘Master of Visions,’ forsooth!” I cried, brutally interrupting
him, “say rather the Master of Imposture!”
The look of sorrow on his kind old face was so intense and painful to
behold that I perceived I had gone too far; but it was too late.
“Farewell, then!” said the old bonze, rising; and after performing the
usual ceremonials of politeness, Tamoora left the house in dignified
silence.
VI
I DEPART—BUT NOT ALONE
Several days later I sailed, but during my stay I saw my venerable
friend the Bonze, no more. Evidently on that last, and to me for ever
memorable evening, he had been seriously offended with my more than
irreverent, my downright insulting remark about one whom he so justly
respected. I felt sorry for him, but the wheel of passion and pride
was too incessantly at work to permit me to feel a single moment of
remorse. What was it that made me so relish the pleasure of wrath,
that when, for one instant, I happened to lose sight of my supposed
grievance toward the Yamabooshi, I forthwith lashed myself back into a
kind of artificial fury against him. He had only accomplished what he
had been expected to do, and what he had tacitly promised; not only so,
but it was I myself who had deprived him of the possibility of doing
more, even for my own protection, if I might believe the Bonze—a man
whom I knew to be thoroughly honorable and reliable. Was it regret at
having been forced by my pride to refuse the proffered precaution, or
was it the fear of remorse that made me rake together, in my heart,
during those evil hours, the smallest details of the supposed insult to
that same suicidal pride? Remorse, as an old poet has aptly remarked,
“is like the heart in which it grows:...
... if proud and gloomy,
It is a poison-tree, that pierced to the utmost,
Weeps only tears of blood.”
Perchance, it was the indefinite fear of something of that sort which
caused me to remain so obdurate, and led me to excuse, under the plea
of terrible provocation, even the unprovoked insults that I had heaped
upon the head of my kind and all-forgiving friend, the priest. However,
it was now too late in the day to recall the words of offence I had
uttered; and all I could do was to promise myself the satisfaction of
writing him a friendly letter, as soon as I reached home. Fool, blind
fool, elated with insolent self-conceit, that I was! So sure did I
feel, that my vision was due merely to some trick of the Yamabooshi,
that I actually gloated over my coming triumph in writing to the
Bonze that I had been right in answering his sad words of parting
with an incredulous smile, as my sister and family were all in good
health—happy!
I had not been at sea for a week, before I had cause to remember his
words of warning!
From the day of my experience with the magic mirror, I perceived a
great change in my whole state, and I attributed it, at first, to the
mental depression I had struggled against for so many months. During
the day I very often found myself absent from the surrounding scenes,
losing sight for several minutes of things and persons. My nights were
disturbed, my dreams oppressive, and at times horrible. Good sailor I
certainly was; and besides, the weather was unusually fine, the ocean
as smooth as a pond. Notwithstanding this, I often felt a strange
giddiness, and the familiar faces of my fellow-passengers assumed at
such times the most grotesque appearances. Thus, a young German I used
to know well was once suddenly transformed before my eyes into his old
father, whom we had laid in the little burial place of the European
colony some three years before. We were talking on deck of the defunct
and of a certain business arrangement of his, when Max Grunner’s head
appeared to me as though it were covered with a strange film. A thick
greyish mist surrounded him, and gradually condensing around and upon
his healthy countenance, settled suddenly into the grim old head I
had myself seen covered with six feet of soil. On another occasion,
as the captain was talking of a Malay thief whom he had helped to
secure and lodge in jail, I saw near him the yellow, villainous face
of a man answering to his description. I kept silence about such
hallucinations; but as they became more and more frequent, I felt very
much disturbed, though still attributing them to natural causes, such
as I had read about in medical books.
One night I was abruptly wakened by a long and loud cry of distress.
It was a woman’s voice, plaintive like that of a child, full of terror
and of helpless despair. I awoke with a start to find myself on land,
in a strange room. A young girl, almost a child, was desperately
struggling against a powerful middle-aged man, who had surprised her in
her own room, and during her sleep. Behind the closed and locked door,
I saw listening an old woman, whose face, notwithstanding the fiendish
expression upon it, seemed familiar to me, and I immediately recognized
it: it was the face of the Jewess who had adopted my niece in the dream
I had at Kioto. She had received gold to pay for her share in the foul
crime, and was now keeping her part of the covenant.... But who was the
victim? O horror unutterable! Unspeakable horror! When I realized the
situation after coming back to my normal state, I found it was my own
child-niece.
But, as in my first vision, I felt in me nothing of the nature of that
despair born of affection that fills one’s heart, at the sight of a
wrong done to, or a misfortune befalling, those one loves; nothing but
a manly indignation in the presence of suffering inflicted upon the
weak and the helpless. I rushed, of course, to her rescue, and seized
the wanton, brutal beast by the neck. I fastened upon him with powerful
grasp, but, the man heeded it not, he seemed not even to feel my hand.
The coward, seeing himself resisted by the girl, lifted his powerful
arm, and the thick fist, coming down like a heavy hammer upon the sunny
locks, felled the child to the ground. It was with a loud cry of the
indignation of a stranger, not with that of a tigress defending her
cub, that I sprang upon the lewd beast and sought to throttle him.
I then remarked, for the first time, that, a shadow myself, I was
grasping but another shadow!....
My loud shrieks and imprecations had awakened the whole steamer. They
were attributed to a nightmare. I did not seek to take anyone into my
confidence; but, from that day forward, my life became a long series of
mental tortures, I could hardly shut my eyes without becoming witness
of some horrible deed, some scene of misery, death or crime, whether
past, present or even future—as I ascertained later on. It was as
though some mocking fiend had taken upon himself the task of making
me go through the vision of everything that was bestial, malignant
and hopeless, in this world of misery. No radiant vision of beauty
or virtue ever lit with the faintest ray these pictures of awe and
wretchedness that I seemed doomed to witness. Scenes of wickedness, of
murder, of treachery and of lust fell dismally upon my sight, and I was
brought face to face with the vilest results of man’s passions, the
most terrible outcome of his material earthly cravings.
Had the Bonze foreseen, indeed, the dreary results, when he spoke of
Daij-Dzins to whom I left “an ingress” “a door open” in me? Nonsense!
There must be some physiological, abnormal change in me. Once at
Nuremberg, when I have ascertained how false was the direction taken by
my fears—I dared not hope for no misfortune at all—these meaningless
visions will disappear as they came. The very fact that my fancy
follows but one direction, that of pictures of misery, of human
passions in their worst, material shape, is a proof to me, of their
unreality.
“If, as you say, man consists of one substance, matter, the object
of the physical senses; and if perception with its modes is only the
result of the organization of the brain, then should we be naturally
attracted but to the material, the earthly”.... I thought I heard the
familiar voice of the Bonze interrupting my reflections, and repeating
an often used argument of his in his discussions with me.
“There are two planes of visions before men,” I again heard him say,
“the plane of undying love and spiritual aspirations, the efflux from
the eternal light; and the plane of restless, ever changing matter, the
light in which the misguided Daij-Dzins bathe.”
VII
ETERNITY IN A SHORT DREAM