XIX

If so far you have believed and understood me, dear reader, it cannot

fail but you will demand more of me than I can give. You will not

demand further proofs, but revelations: communications from beings of

another sphere, distinct, well-formulated communications concerning the

beyond, concerning the meaning of our life, concerning the soul,

concerning Christ, concerning God. Everyone desires these, not

considering that for a distinct communication two factors are always

required - namely, a good communicator and a good understander; just as

air and fuel are required to start a flame.

I myself, as everyone would have, also sought for revelation, and many

a time instead of calling Emmy I committed the folly of calling for

Christ, or even worse, for God.

In the clear moments of observation of the night one can only

effectually carry through one thing, there is no time for more; and it

would happen that throughout the entire vision I would pray

passionately, not thinking of Emmy, thanking God for his favors and

beseeching him for enlightenment, and in the same way Christ. I could

never do it by day with so much earnestness, conviction and eloquence.

In the daytime I am not eloquent, but bashful and embarrassed, even

when alone. I cannot pray by day for fear of feeling ridiculous, for

gêne. But at night this gêne is gone and I abandon myself to prayer

with a true passion, sometimes - even as all passions in the immaterial

life - going beyond my control. At times my devout passion during

prayer, even at the very moment, seems exaggerated and affected to me,

but I am unable to restrain it.

But now the remarkable fact about it is that I never, absolutely never,

have perceived anything in my visions that at my passionate and ardent

invocation appeared as a divine image, as an angel or as Christ. Human

beings, dead or living, came almost always when at all strongly urged;

Emmy I saw many times in various shapes and circumstances. But at my

invocations and prayers to these higher beings, whose existence man has

always had to conclude from the signs of the world perceptible to the

senses or from inner consciousness, I have never seen anything but what

we call natural beauties - sunlight; blue heavens; flaming evening

skies; radiant horizons, brightening or clouding with promising or

warning significance.

And this where the history of human civilization is replete with

stories of visions of angels, of Mary, and of Christ. We may explain

this as we like, yet it proves that the simple wish, the invocation,

the self-suggestion is not enough to create a visionary image. The

demons of the Middle Ages I have seen, but not their angels, their

Marys, their Jesus, their God the Father, while yet I often longed for

it as a child and prayed for it as a man, until I was old and wise

enough to understand that I had to be glad of their non-appearance,

because the apparition of an old, bearded king as God, of a

white-robed, long-haired man as Jesus, of a winged man as an angel,

would simply have been nothing but fancied images, spectral deception

or impotent human phantasy.

Does not our simplest reason tell us that all life that is more than

human life, all higher beings, whether superman, or Christ, or God, can

have no form perceptible to man with his five senses? Do not all

endeavors of art and imagination to create something above man, remain

limited to a perfected humanity? Has not the sole conception of a

superhuman being always been the impossible one of a man with wings?

Yet we know that there is a higher being, higher life with more exalted

beauties; but clear reflection must also teach us that its form remains

imperceptible and unimaginable as long as our perceptive faculty and

our knowledge have not, in a manner at present quite inconceivable,

increased in a higher sphere, and that therefore all their awarded

shapes, though formed by Dantesque phantasy, must be erroneous.

Sometimes, indeed, I saw worlds and sad beings that, much as they

resembled the familiar and human, seemed to me to belong to a wholly

different sphere. One night I dreamed of the sea, but it changed to

something else, - a park, a landscape peopled with many creatures. I

remember that the ground was moving like ocean waves, but magnificently

blue and speckled with intensely yellow spots. There were also bushes

and a multitude of happy, festive, richly dressed human beings. They

were not demons, that I felt, but a species of men - happy, luxuriously

living men.

Then I remembered that I was on another planet, and though my

consciousness was not yet quite clear, still I began to pay close

attention. Thus I remember that I gazed at the sky and seeing the blue

color immediately drew the conclusion: "so there is oxygen in this

atmosphere too," because it is oxygen that gives the blue color to our

atmosphere. I went on and on and the landscape changed repeatedly. The

inhabitants were extremely sympathetic and kindly disposed toward me.

Of language or words I have no remembrance, but there was a cordial

understanding. Then I saw trees and hills or something resembling them,

and I fell into raptures. "0 my earth!" I cried, "it resembles my

earth!" and I wept with emotion, because it reminded me of my beloved

earth. Then I noticed that everything differed somewhat from earthly

things and yet resembled them. "Just as America resembles Europe and

yet differs from it," I thought in my dream.

Upon this I came into a barren and uninhabited part and I saw a

perspective of mountains, a mountain chain rising out of the sea,

luminous and steep, but so affecting and terrible to behold that it

oppressed me. The perspective stretched out farther and farther - a

dizzy extent, and all the way my eyes travelled along the ridge of

faint-rose-colored rocks. Below me, at the left, was a mighty abyss,

also, a distant mountain prospect. I saw everything with peculiar

sharpness and distinctness. My mind was clear at the time and I was

fully conscious - the terrific depth made me dizzy.

Thereupon I saw two strange beings in the wilderness. Human beings also

- not demons. One was slate-colored like clay, the other brownish red

like baked earth. They were hard at work - and the thought crossed my

mind whether these were perchance the proletarians, who in this land

supported the luxurious people I had just now seen. They were busy with

a fire and I asked them something, about food or wood I believe.

Laughingly they explained: "That is scarce here." Then I pointed back

toward the land where I had left the people living in affluence:

"Yet it is not scarce there." Thereupon they laughed, feigning

indifference, and intimated, how I no longer remember, that they were

not envious of this, that these things were not essential, that it

should be so. I awoke pondering the meaning of this dream, which I did

not comprehend, and even now would not dare to explain entirely.

All that the perception during sleep teaches us, demands exactly as

much scientific thought and comparison, critical analysis and

selection, and building up into fixed, universal and lasting truth, as

do all our waking perceptions. There can be no other true revelation

than that of creative art and of science, established by all and for

all. What would a personal revelation signify, that depended on the

receptivity of a single individual, and could be affirmed in a few

words and, by suggestion, forced upon the unreceptive? Would it not be

as though the Divinity entrusted to the apostle the work of convincing

thousands, where he himself had found only one - the apostle -

susceptible to persuasion? Can such a revelation, spread by inculcation

and pressure, by authority and servility, be anything else than passing

fancy, and fleeting deception?

Therefore the study of the immaterial did not draw me away from the

world of day, but caused me to work in it with all the more zeal and

satisfaction, because I learned to look upon this world as our real

field of labor, where the riches that shall count on a higher plane of

vision are prepared.

Dreams only give us slight hints; the work must be done in this life.

But my dreams also showed me that solitude and seclusion could never

lead to the highest joy and purest bliss. Unspeakably happy as were the

moments of meeting with my dream bride, they were surpassed by those in

which a universal joy, a great and transcendent enthusiasm

simultaneously filling many beings - human happy beings - carried along

myself and my beloved in a wave of radiant festive bliss.

I have had them often, such dreams, and they were the most beautiful of

all. I know not whether they were the proclaimers of future or the

dawning of already existing reality - but I would see spectacles of

countless enthusiastic multitudes, processions of festive people

streaming together and marching in solemn rhythm, with jubilation and

sound of clarion. And we two, my beloved and I, were a part thereof, we

belonged to it; and a feeling of festiveness and of unlimited

confidence toward all possessed us, lifting us up into a bright and

joyous mood, and yet not detracting from our mutual affection, but

transfiguring and strengthening it.

Thereby - as through repeated experience I learned to understand them -

truths were pointed out to me in a peculiar symbolical way. Thus I once

saw in my dream many people building a large house and laying out a

path, and they did it with marvellous alacrity. And there was no one to

command them, to give directions, or point out anything.

The incredible swiftness with which the work advanced was due to the

fact that each one of the builders, down to the very least, knew and

comprehended the entire work and therefore did not need the slightest

direction.

I understood these hints better and better, and more and more clearly

comprehended what hindered man on his upward path - the dawning rays of

pure universal blessedness shone for me ever more brightly from out the

chaos of our confused personal and social life. But all the more

tormentingly I felt my impotence to bring about an effectual reform.