Very few people, you, dear reader, excepted, will find anything
important or curious in these records. The lay philistine will consider
them an idle play of the imagination for his amusement, and speedily
forget them. The philistine scholar will smilingly utter a few words of
authority, whereby he will consider the matter explained and settled.
There is such a one, his book is lying before me, who pretends to have
solved the entire mystery of dreams. Mind it well - the entire mystery.
And then he pronounces a few hollow phrases, which as an "Open, sesame"
should give admission to all the unspeakable wonders of this untrodden
reality, saying: "the dream is a wish fulfilled." Then upon this the
man is contented and glad, considering that he has said something.
I cannot furnish you with positive proof, dear reader, that it was
surely my beloved who appeared to me at night as my betrothed. Some of
the facts could probably be accounted as proof that my nocturnal
observations are not merely creations of my own imagination, but that
they concern a world with which others also are in communion, and which
has a peculiar nature. There was indeed a correspondence between the
words heard and the things seen by me at night and that which, unknown
to me, had occurred in the waking life. But I had no need of these
proofs. The primal feeling of certainty is a feeling that one gains by
experience. The communication of this feeling along the lines of reason
is an illusion that never subsists, nor has subsisted. We communicate
primal certainties to one another along intuitive and suggestive lines,
not by proofs. Though my proofs were clear as crystal and firm as rock,
the obstinate would easily reason them away; while only those who by
repeated and repeated observation have gained complete assurance can
also value the significance of the observations. For what I observed is
like the tiny spark from the rubbed piece of amber, like the
contraction of the muscles of the dead frog that Galvani observed - a
small phenomenon that the unbelieving ridicules, but in which the wise
sees the germ of new, never-guessed-at conceptions and deeds.
From that night when Emmy appeared to me, at my summons, as my bride, I
led for many years a double life, in which the incidents of the day did
not seem more important to me than the observations of the night. A
successful reunion with Emmy in the joy sphere of the dream was to me
the best and most joyous event, that I desired more and remembered with
more grateful satisfaction, than the most fortunate incident of my
daily life. The few solitary moments in the night, recurring only a
limited number of times during the long year, and perhaps lasting but a
few minutes, in force of impression and deep after-effects outweighed
the many days crowded with events, so that now it seems to me as though
the years had flown by and I can measure and define them better by the
visions of the nights than by the events of the day.
Yet my life was not empty, not barren in deeds and experience; but it
was the ordinary life that thousands lead and that has already left so
many wise and sensitive men unsatisfied, because they could not
penetrate the deeper meaning, and saw death and destruction so
unavoidably threatening them at the end of their career.
In accordance with my father's wishes, which my mother sanctioned, I
became a diplomat and lived and worked in different countries, first as
attaché and later as secretary of the legation. Outwardly my life was
as prosperous as could be and all who knew me envied me, without
therefore showing me ill will or seeking to harm me. I had a sweet,
pretty wife who bore me four fair, healthy children, I had money enough
for a life of luxury and plenty, and did my work with apparent devotion
and success. Transferal was the cause of frequent travel, and I saw a
large part of the civilized human world. We lived in sunny Madrid,
fragrant with acacias and carnations, with its subtle dangerous
atmosphere, its elegantly indolent culture, its desolate surroundings;
- in restless Marseilles, full of crime and rabble, where we never felt
safe; - in orderly, methodical, soberly bourgeois Berlin, where they
strive so sagaciously and diligently for culture; - in blithe and
beautiful Paris, where they still live on happily in the illusion that
they are the leaders of civilization; - in the not less self-satisfied
London, immutably grim in its sombreness, hardened in its dangerous
luxury and misery, full of intellectual life, but without much sign of
improvement, like a strong, prosperous, hardened villain; - in wanton
St. Petersburg, with its extremely polished, yet withal ever equally
barbarous luxury; - in vain, amusing Vienna, where all thought of the
possibility of still higher culture has long ago been given up as
insulting; - in the curiously grave and affected Washington, with its
trim green lawns and white buildings of state in confectioner's style,
with its blasé air of aristocratic calm and state in the midst of the
bustling, bourgeois, informal but intensely living American world; -
finally in the little, neat, doll-like Hague, that is so difficult to
consider as real, where the good Hollanders play at Metropolis and
where even the diplomatic world acquires the well-nigh comic aspect of
a very chic and well-cast amateur stage.
I could not have borne this existence calmly, without the stay of my
nocturnal experiences, without the constant preoccupation with the
miracle that again and again befell me, without the remembrance of how
I had last seen and heard Emmy, without the looking forward to her
return, and the considering of what I would do and say and what I
should observe in her the next time.
I did not therefore neglect my daily work; on the contrary, I performed
it with vigor and perseverance solely on that account. But how others
could cheerfully persevere in it I could not understand - unless they
were insignificant persons, wholly governed by the power of formal
religion and conventional patriotism. And I must admit, too, that the
most advanced and independent of my colleagues did not continue their
task without bitter self-derision and a sort of melancholy
epicureanism. Diplomacy may be carried on with fine forms and on a
grand scale, yet it remains nothing but an exceedingly narrow-minded
bickering for the greatest profit, for the largest morsel. Something
remarkable lies in the fact that the diplomat does not fight directly
for his own profit, but identifies himself with the Government he
represents. But what man fights for a really personal profit and not
for a fancied one? Thus the zeal, the enthusiasm, the satisfaction of
the diplomat is usually the same as that of the player moving wooden
figures about on a board, and finding his pleasure in the making and
the disentangling of confusion. But an earnest man asks after all: what
is the good of it all? Wherefore do I work and let so many others work
for me? My body which I keep in condition with so much care shall
wither, the royal house or the Government for which I fight and exert
myself some day shall fall after all; and though I fought not for
myself, nor even for my Government and people, but for a still higher
ideal - humanity - will it not also die some time when the earth shall
dry up and become uninhabitable?
These questions must be answered, for it is not true that it is man's
nature to go on working with courage and zeal without their being
answered. No; if he now still goes on working without an answer, it is
because he does not reflect. But it is truly man's nature to reflect
and thus he is still making his living by denying his nature. This is a
contradiction doomed to disappear. And I witnessed with pity the
endeavors of the so-called religious people, like my good wife Lucia,
to escape the chill wind of the new knowledge by the fostering of a
worn, patched and half-decayed Church system. Her cheerful acquiescence
and placid contentment in the enervated, marrowless shadow of what was
once, for a more childish generation, a solid joy, seemed pathetic to
me. Faithfully she sought her daily share of consecration, edification
and purification, that every human spirit needs as much as the body
needs a bath. But it was a dead, nerveless consecration through sounds
and impressions from which the living thought, the soul, had long
vanished. How could the poetry of the Hebrews and the thoughts of the
Middle Ages still touch her? Only the hollow tones of the declaiming
priests and the outward magnificence of the churchly edifice brought
something like a fleeting shadow of the true sense of the divine. And
in the poetry or music which she could really and wholly feel, in the
art of her age, in the thought and science of her age - the living,
direct expression of God - in these she did not seek, because round
about her no one realized that only in these consecration is found, and
must be sought for.
But for me, that which had been indicated by the meditative of all the
ages, in vague, and for the most part impotent, expression, began to
acquire a new, wonderful character of reality. I had learned to speak,
to hear, to see, to taste, to smell, to touch, to create things and
beings, and to enter into relations with what seemed to me independent
beings, without having the body - that which is positively doomed to
destruction - take part. What generation after generation had repeated
one after the other as empty sound, idle chimera, or suggestion, the
existence of a world beyond the senses, had for me become actual
experience. I knew now that I had another body, beside the ordinary
one, an animæ corpus, with a proper world of perception; and this
knowledge rested upon equally good foundations as every one's knowledge
concerning the existence of his ordinary body. Time and again I faced
the undeniable wonder of another space, perceived by the selfsame I,
from the same centre of observation, as the space by day.
What some sages had presumed and concluded by speculation - that what
we call room and place is nothing but one of the infinitely numerous
ways of perception of our being that neither taken up room nor occupies
space, the ego that is neither here nor there - had become for me an
ordinary fact, the knowledge of which influenced all my thought. That
I, without stirring from my place, could arrive in a totally different
world, in many worlds, all with a proper space, all with the same
evidence of real existence, all full of life, full of sensations, fall
of beauties and transports - this became for me a matter of simple
experience. And no one only knowing it from hearsay can realize how
different and how much more profound is the effect of actual experience.
In this conjunction the eternal error of the human phantasy in wishing
to fly directly toward the perfect and complete revealed itself. All
the defective work of the human imagination errs in wanting to make its
creations too beautiful, in affording a soulless perfection, such as is
manifested in human art by its decay after every period of bloom.
The insensible world is not full of pure loftiness and unmixed
nobility. I do not constantly wander there in Elysian fields, absorbed
in flowing conversations regarding important questions with spectres of
noble stature and dignified bearing. As all reality, the reality of the
beyond is unexpectedly fantastic, full of surprises and full of
disillusions; but on the whole more stimulating and more beautiful than
anything the imagination has pictured regarding it. And this is of
supreme importance in the practice of our daily life - that the
insensible world is in part our own creation, subject to our will,
built up from the conclusions gathered in our day-life, with the
faculties and powers which by practice and use we have in this same
life made our own. To say for this reason that nothing new awaits us
would be equal to the assertion that Beethoven had given nothing new to
the world, because, after all, he only employed combinations of
familiar sounds and tones. I again repeat - nothing in our actual
day-life can equal the ecstasy of even a single awakening in the new
sphere.
And who would now confront me with the assertion that then probably the
dear being that appeared at my summons as my bride and made me
supremely happy in her arms, was also my own creation - to him I can
only reply as he himself would reply to the agnostic philosopher, if
the latter asked him for proofs that the entire world of the senses,
with his wife and children and the whole family included, were anything
else than a product of his imagination.
Does it make much difference whether we give to one and the same thing,
vehemently and intensely felt, the name of fancy or the name of
reality? - and does anyone know a reliable mark of distinction between
the two? Everything is the product of imagination, the sun and the
stars are also works of God's imagination. But there is weak and
strong, enervated and potently creative imagination; and very subtle is
the boundary line between the idle thought image and the created one,
endowed with personal being and reality.
How absurd, in the light of my experience, now seemed to me the common
idea of the so-called believers - as though the earthly life with all
its joys and its misery would break off all at once with death and
suddenly, without transition, change into a bliss the purer, the more
miserable had been the earthly existence.
All that we can expect is directly connected with what we attained
here. Here on earth, imperceptibly and continuously, we weave our
future, not by a right to reward from on high, as compensation for
sorrow and disaster, accounted and awarded irrespective of any action
on our part, but by personal activity, personal ability, personal
achievement of the joy and ecstasy we deem the most desirable.
Therefore the closer knowledge and study of the immaterial reality does
not lead away from the earthly life and coöperation with all striving
humanity, as the fanatics and ascetics in the misconception of their
idle and defective phantasy have believed and taught.
No, the blessedness that we all desire and can attain at will, must
already be sought for here in our mortal life, in this earthly sphere.
For only from the transient can the less transitory be compiled.
I now knew that my immaterial being with the repose or decease of the
waking body, also lost the heaviness and the aches, the melancholy and
dejection proceeding from the mortal, defective nature of this body:
but I also knew that its joys and transports are dependent upon the
happiness obtained by the day body through an active, wise life brought
into harmony with the development of all mankind.
The more beautiful my days, the more crowded with effective labor my
life, the gladder and serener my soul - the loftier also are the
exaltations and transports of my nights, the more glorious the scenes I
behold, the more beneficent the moods and the influences I undergo.
True, often a dream of most sublime splendor comes to brighten a time
of the very deepest dejection; but only when this earthly affliction in
the necessary consequence of the struggle for a higher and more common
happiness, when I am after all inwardly hopeful and know that I am on
the right road.
But, poverty, want, misery, affliction and loneliness are not good
guides toward a better life, and smothered desires not good travelling
companions.
The will for happiness may indeed burn so brightly in some of us that
its flame shoots up all the higher through all the accumulated sorrow;
but the spark of joy must remain visibly glowing, and to keep the
sacred lamp of gladness burning is the primal duty of every human being.
It is true that man has often shown that he could not stand luxury and,
like a child, broke out into folly when abundance came after a long
period of want. But wealth is the only nurturing ground for the bloom
of beauty, whereto in our striving for a higher life, we feel ourselves
called.
Only in the land of abundance can we play the game of beauty which is
our sole destination and which unites our nature to God's nature. And
if we cannot stand abundance we must learn to accustom ourselves to it.
He who created us leads us by the line of joy, another link between Him
and us does not exist. Though the way lead through dismal gloom, the
luring voice of happiness continues to go before us. That is our will
and God's will, disagreement is but misunderstanding.
Forgive me, dear reader, if I join the conclusions to the facts. I know
that among them there are many confirmations of ancient, long-known
truths. But you shall see that the very simplest and most well-known
facts must be repeated to men over and over again, because they lack
the courage and originality to keep their hold on them.