The solitary life is an alchemical experience, a transmutation of the being that is not without danger. You must patiently burn away all impurity before hoping to see in yourself the Clear Primordial Light. Can I help my soul to free itself from the last ties that bind it? Since everything is only calls, echoes, resonance, is it possible to do it by incantation, by magic?
I decided to make myself a musical instrument. Since I was almost destitute it would have to be rather primitive. Using an old metal drum as an echo chamber, I nailed on a heavy board with a round hole in it. Wooden pegs enabled me to tension some strong supple nylon threads I found in a drawer in the skete, which were probably used for fishing. A small movable board, which altered the depth of pitch, completed my creation. I carried it to a narrow crevice halfway up the cliffs. It was hardly a cave, as I could not stand upright in it, but it had one advantage: from there the view stretched right over the forests to the bright marble of Athos.
The rough surface of the rock bruised my shoulders and my back terribly. I hugged my warm woollen coat tightly round me, and, sitting up straight, my heavy boots pulled under my thighs, I took up the lotus position, having no wish to prostrate myself before gods who, even if they exist, are themselves only ancient dreamers. I made peace with myself, I breathed slowly. Freezing cold air, which smelt of dead leaves and humus, went deep down into my lungs. I held my breath; the damp and the bitter cold swept through me. Feeling sorry for myself would have served no purpose at the point I had reached in my destiny. I had distanced myself from humans to become an adult at last, alone in the face of the Awakening, unlamenting in the rocky hole where I had hidden myself, a hundred metres above a fast-flowing stream.
My musical instrument, lying across my thighs, attracted me. This object, made with my own hands, was a part of me, filled with my desires, my tendencies. I wanted to hear the sound it made. I closed my eyes; I touched a string: it vibrated intensely in the cramped cave, which made the resonance even stronger. Another string: this was a new aptitude of my spirit, which sang in the absolute silence.
From string to string I explored the different powers of my soul. Was my true self, like space and time, nothing but resonance and sounds, taken up by many different echoes? I was getting closer to the Awakening, if only through the distinct feeling of time exploding; more precisely, I was beginning to see its real nature: it does not flow like a river; it breaks up, forever changing, forever returning to non-existence, only to reappear—not further forward, but elsewhere.
Faced with intermittent time, I had to see myself, from age to age, from a viewpoint that was also constantly being broken apart, shattered. I had to acknowledge not so much that the self is only an illusion, but rather that it can reveal itself at the same moment in different places and times, that it is capable of ceasing to be, so that it can be reborn. I did not lack courage: so why not try and live in that dimension? Why not accept real time, real space, constantly changing?
The Byzantine painters had also had a sense of the real. Through love of gold I had brought an icon into this rocky fissure. I opened my eyes: the Nazarene was enthroned in glory, surrounded by a pattern of multicoloured rectangles and circles strangely interpenetrating. He stood in the centre of a space, book in hand. At first sight it seemed utterly absurd! Yet this ‘naive’ painting was not so far from reality. To understand the real, even though it is contrary to all apparent logic; to know that in this cave I was—also—elsewhere, without ceasing to be myself, without ceasing to be here; so why reject this adventure of the spirit, I thought, looking at a sky that was dark, icy-blue, and which, as evening came, turned an almost-black violet above the pure marble slopes of the Holy Mountain.
Suddenly I felt dizzy, and almost passed out. Not only was I shivering with anguish and cold, but moving to a higher level of consciousness also meant that I could no longer ignore the problematic nature of my existence, whose constant transformations, in different times, had driven away for ever all notion of identity. Several times during my adventures on Athos, I had got a glimpse of this lack of true identity, and noticed frequent disappearances of time. This evening the certainty of being only a soul, an aspect of the divine cast endlessly into an unbelievably vast space, and into several constantly disconnected times, made me frightened.
I thought I was destroyed. Then I came to, back to at least one of my possible lives. But who was I? I had acquired a taste for indescribable freedom! Perhaps very unhappy, I would not have wanted to return to a half-sleep: to be only a man, shut away in one time, in a single life, and in a single condition. I remembered having lived a hundred times, always the same yet each one different, an alchemist in Byzantium, a monk in Russia, on Athos, in Asia! To me, my true self was only an archetype, linked to many different adventures, to continual echoes. What the Indians call ‘karma’. I watched it with detachment, even though it interested me enormously ... its joys, like its sorrows, seemed only to be those of a friend I had always known. The Awakening; no doubt I had been prepared for it for a long time; my spirit grew calmer and got used to its new life.
The moon rose above the forests in a winter sky. I gathered together a few stones and some dry wood at the entrance to my little cave. I lit a fire, made some tea, still sitting on the ground, legs folded under me, kindling the flames with slow, measured, very Asiatic movements. I came from Asia—or somewhere else! For a moment I was almost sure I came from the future, from a world and a civilization that knew the real nature of space and time. Then this intuition was wiped away; my water was boiling, I threw in a pinch of tea; I picked up the saucepan, put it down it beside me, still breathing slowly, then holding my breath.
My flames dead, the glow of a red ember burnt through the darkness. Thousands of stars, and the perfect disc of the moon were now shining in a black sky. Again I was seized with fear. The change to a higher state of consciousness had to be won from an appalling panic. I had the impression of falling into the void! Mustering all my will-power I returned to my present state, to this rocky hole. I stirred up the embers, drank my tea. This evening it was as if I had reached a point of breaking away. From now on I could believe that my nature, my tendencies, my virtues and vices would survive for ever in all possible times. Trembling with fear, I accepted my new condition. In all my lives I had loved the sky, but in an enchanted, adolescent way. This evening I watched the stars with a gaze that was unknown to me: my soul, awakened to its true dimensions and an adult at last, was sharing in the secret movements of the perfect constellations. Looking at the sky, I was a new being, absent from itself—FOR EVER PRESENT in the universe! This equation now seemed very normal, self-evident; I would not have wanted to give up this new vision, or go back to a primitive opinion of man, space and time. Yet it took a great effort of will not to flee the terrifying state that mine had become, beyond all personal identity. But I was not ‘the others’; I was myself at last, a mentally adult man who is discovering his real dimension in the universe, and who for the first time gives his soul to the time of the stars.
I was slowly getting used to this new state. The unpredictable resurgence of primeval terrors seemed to be fading, giving way to a divine peace.
The moon spread a peaceful, sacred glow over the rocks, leaving me and my rocky fissure in deep shadow. Again I picked up the musical instrument that was resting on my knees; I leant the heavy board of this poor harp on one shoulder. It was cold enough to split rocks. With a frozen finger I plucked a string: it reverberated, then fell silent. Using vibrations, could I dispel the chaos of dreams, awaken the pure sound and, through it, conquer my old fears? I improvised a glass-like music in the presence of eternity. Crystal clear, my strings sang in the brilliant night, studded with stars and constellations. After so much pride, after so much strange idleness, yet full of potential, disinterested in myself, I gave myself up to this shining space. With all my new soul I shared in the glory of the stars. A string vibrated, and divided time into delightful moments; another one called me to t
he Awakening. Then, as the sounds moved on, they all found pure chords. The slow vibrating of the strings became frenzied; the sweet strings beneath my fingers, the sounds they made, it was me: broken, shattered, despairing, overjoyed.
I was suffering less from cold and loneliness. At least I could admit that I was alone, at such a time in my life! I carried on playing; using the resonance, I freed myself from my ancient fears. The music purified, destroyed, rebuilt my soul. The basic tendencies of my nature ... already no longer belonged to me. I saw them outside myself, outside time, available; they were becoming unfamiliar to me. Another state of mind was taking their place, harder, more lucid, totally committed to the starry sky. I paused; my anguish did not cloud my joy; the discovery of real time, real space, and the beauty of this freezing night delighted me. It was what I had always wanted.
I picked up my musical instrument again, this time not wanting to hear anything except the pure sound of the strings. I was attaining wisdom, but in a wild state! When I stopped to think about it, my presence in the region of the caves coincided with the total decline of the Holy Mountain. The unforeseen successor to the pious anchorites: in the land of the worshippers of Christ and the Virgin, I was not a Christian. No doubt I was an artist. In a trance, bursts of light flashed across my mind; I was certain of it: a great power for dreaming and contemplation was going to appear in mankind. For a second I was again certain that I came from the future, then the thought was wiped away. But the conviction remained that I was an enemy of Christianity, this religion of simple folk, destined to quickly die out. The NEW BEING came from the depths of the human psyche, and from all points of time and space—the real, adult man, the man of the future, the worshipper of the heavens who was being born in me, and who took over from the ancient solitaries who had been in love with Jesus in these caverns. So why should he not be an ARTIST, in a world that has no other goal than to become aware of its own splendour!
A strange artist, in fact, playing the harp in an icy fissure. A primitive forerunner of the man to be born, I was dying of cold and anguish, happy, singing under the stars. For I was singing. An incantation came from my lips. An artist on the brink of the pure Awakening, on a winter night under a polar sky, in a lost gorge of the divine universe. Time and space broken, my joy, my surprise and my happy delirium were no more than music, words, the whisper of the soul, song, the sound of strings! With my metal can gripped firmly between my feet, and the wooden keys resting on my forehead, so much sound was echoing in my head, almost the sound of God, almost the primordial sound. My fingers ran over the strings from low to high; all I had to do was move the bridge, a simple little board, and to change the register and the key, to alter everything, to call everything into question, as you pass from one life to another. With the bridge slightly moved, music from India became a melody of old Europe, then Africa, then Asia once more. I was playing humanity’s past, my own. More often, very pure, crystalline sounds that resembled no known music, and which came from the future, rose up to the stars.
It must have been very late. For a long time I had been able to withstand the cold by means of energy, and also courage. I had to leave this rocky fissure and head for my bed. I set off along a path round the cliff, on the edge of emptiness. Bright moonlight lit up the rocks that jutted out above my head, but the narrow track that I hesitated to take without a light was left in total darkness.
Some of my embers were still burning. I gathered them up in a metal saucepan and blew gently on it; a pretty flame dispelled the darkness. I ventured back out onto the cliff path, holding up the saucepan at arm’s length, with a faint, uncertain, dancing glimmer guiding my steps. I went down the side of the cliff towards my cave, the icon under my coat. Half-burnt incense must have been mixed in with the glowing coals, for a grey, sweetly-scented smoke followed my slow progress. You would have thought I was burning incense to the stars, alone, by a river late at night.
I stopped to get my breath back. Standing, I leant against the damp rock, with the saucepan at my feet. The brands were going out, but a delicate, delightful fragrance still drifted through the air.
It was one of the most beautiful winter nights I have seen. The harshness of the cold made the starry sky like a pure equation of crystal and fire. Beyond the dark cliffs the Milky Way sparkled with amazing clarity. Countless constellations existed in all possible times: stars born thousands of years ago were going to appear in several black holes in space; a dead star was still glowing, still alive in front of my eyes; young, virgin constellations were gently pulsing; unforeseeable nebulae, spread through the universe as cosmic dust, belonged only to the future. The moon’s divine mirror fascinated and attracted me; tonight, in the clear air, you would have thought it was a block of ice, closer to the earth than usual.
I could not take my eyes off the Holy Eternity, which is God, of the COSMOS—LIVING BEING. Creation is not yet finished. It wants to continue, and to find itself in the consciousness of a superior human type. In a sense, I thought, my being here in this lost gorge, my solitude and my anguish, call—for the time being—not so much for the appearance of a new psyche, but rather prove the temporary defeat of a human type with a superior gift for contemplation, a divine race older than history, forced to flee, to take refuge in holes in the rock. I am alone in this region of caves, without wife or child: but would I want to have a son, if it is not from You, O radiant Eternity? For I love You, O Eternity.
Beautiful flames warmed me up quite quickly. I burnt almost the last of my logs. Then, using my stool, I climbed onto the platform where my blankets were. Right at the back of the cave, it was an old hayloft, so crudely cut out of the rock with great chisel-blows that it retained a primordial appearance, and seemed as old as the world. I felt safe here. Within easy reach I could set out my pen-holder, my lamp and my supply of sugar kept dry in a metal tin, and rest my ink-well in a hole that might have been there expressly for the purpose. Up here, in this big stone bed, I had brought my saucepan full of boiling tea. Now, in the middle of the night, I felt no desire at all for sleep. When I was young I slept like a log. With the coming of old age, it was with regret that I felt my eyelids grow heavy. I slept little, constantly staying up all night, thanks to the tea I was always drinking, and because I was reaching a divine state.
Refusing to sleep increased my mental faculties tenfold. I saw the universe in all its glory, and my true situation in relation to the furthest stars. Like it, I was eternal! To have lived for ever, from life to life—and to know it—that is the true dimension of the awakened man, of the real man whose thousand-year duration goes back to the time of the stars. Which is not that of humans! From a certain level of consciousness onwards, the future is not necessarily further forward, but elsewhere; life and death, what is experienced and what is imagined, past and present, are no longer seen as contradictory.
From this perspective, pen-holder in hand, I reread the account of my adventures on the Holy Mountain. What connected the happy adolescent who travelled all over Athos to the old man I had become? It was simply the projection of one single being onto different times. Should I even believe in such a thing as spiritual progress? My present haunted, holy delirium was worth no more or less than the wanderings and debauchery of that inquisitive boy—me!
In his way, Joshua had been my servant and my son, and an adolescent part of my eternal soul, met by chance: someone I loved in a former life, found, then lost again; but who could reappear. Had I been Eric Strauss, whose clothes I had worn for a while before selling them to an innkeeper, who had been eager to give them to one of his mule-driver friends? In another life had I really been that young German soldier, a philosophy graduate, on a special mission to Mount Athos at a time when other Germans were sent to Nepal or Tibet by the government of the Third Reich? Yes and no; I had not been Strauss—but only just! Like him I rejected Christianity, and wanted to renounce a rationalistic view of the world for a magical thought—I had read his notebooks. If I had been born in Munich t
wenty years earlier, in all probability I would have been that German. I had been Strauss for a few hours! Unforeseeably, this Aryan side of my nature came up against the Slavic, nomadic mentality of a man who was a monk in Russia. Further back, or at the same time, I had known Asia. Was the Athos I loved, and spoke about in this story, the same one you can see on maps? Or was it actually another one, very similar, close in minute details, but parallel, and located in the after-life?
I had known Byzantium and Europe. I was in this cave, and elsewhere. If I wanted to know who I was, I was ending up in an incredible cosmic dimension, pushing back the limits of experience, of the possible, further and further to infinity. Writing by the faint glow of the lamp, I had told my story up as far as this night of vigil. Continuing on, I wrote the next part: what was going to happen to me now, my final wanderings. Quickly I brought my account to its end; I finished my journey on the Holy Mountain! All that remained for me to do now was to live out what I had foreseen.
It was the very end of the night, the delicious moment when, in an incredible silence, everything seems to be sleeping in the hands of the pure and calm Eternity which men call God. In this lost gorge, I was sure of it; mysterious curves, elsewhere and in a different time, brought everything back to Him.
I took another look at my icon. Christ was enthroned, completely motionless, a book in his hand, at the centre of a pattern of red rectangles and black circles, interpenetrating at several points.
Seen naively it was not reality, but the symbol of an unfathomable mystery: God, Primordial Light, uncreated, alone exists at the heart of a space that is subject to strange distortions, often broken up, meeting itself in all possible dimensions; a space spread across infinity—while returning to its point of departure which it has never left. I was not a Christian, but the design of the icon was still valid. Although unbelievable at first, it was true. In the silence of the night I felt that an enormous part of the universe was slowly coming back towards God, while another was moving away.
A Journey to Mount Athos Page 17