by Unknown
Last night (The “Pre-introductory and Critical Note” was written in 1966), I was once again skimming through the pages of the translated version of the Diary and my mind went back to him. Many old things have since been lost, but I had never forgotten that I had these manuscripts in my possession. In fact, the more the years went by and the carelessness of youth faded, the more the thought of them would haunt me with pangs of guilt.
I have pondered on their publication for a long time. Not only for reasons of the natural respect on behalf of a student towards the memory of his old teacher, but also due to the latter’s very rare case. It was thanks to the unprecedented fate of his private life that Dienach was lucky enough to be aware of many of the things that would occur many years hence—via the science of the space age—accessible to the wise and, in fact, via the methods of scientific research which natural sciences hold dear.
Many will say: “Is it possible for cases of such detailed memories of pre-existence to occur in the middle of Europe?” However, one should ask the following: “Why have people with such living memories of a previous existence only appeared in the East Indies?” The prevalence of materialism in the European lifestyle has reached exaggeration and positivism has infused the spirit of the European man to the extent of unbearable one-sidedness. The more you let go of these things, the more they do too.
Nowadays, the name Dienach is still unknown. It is natural to be absent from every index of writers, every encyclopaedia. However, there will come a day when he shall be an honoured and glorified name. The distant descendants of modern Western Europeans shall utter it with respect. There will come a time when one shall see all things he so thoroughly describes in his texts come true in Europe. He so vividly portrays them because he has seen them with his own two eyes. He has actually lived all that he narrates.
Just like the night they brought me the manuscripts, so it was two days ago, that I read until nightfall. Just like that time, I did not wish to turn the lights on. Just like that time, I thought I would suddenly see the figure of my distant friend in the still of the night, appearing between the two window panes that shone milky white in the darkness, as milky white as I remember my friend’s complexion from those times of old…
For all those who do not wish to hear anything about parapsychology, extra-sensory perception and cases of metapsychic phenomena, for those who do not accept anything beyond the limits of scientific thinking and data, Dienach did not see and live his writings, but invented them. He envisioned, that is, the course of future cultural developments of our species and more specifically the white race and as a matter of fact—daring to courageously and lastingly address—for a rather considerable period of time. Besides, he recorded his own convictions in each field of philosophical thinking (especially moral and cognitive-theoretic convictions), his own metaphysical beliefs.
According to this view, Dienach had put his own thoughts in the mouths of his heroes (Jaeger, Silvia, Lain, Cornelius, Stefan, Astrucci, Hilda, Syld and so on) of a rather novel narration. This, however, is hardly believable by anyone who had the chance to meet Dienach in person and was aware that he was not some exceptional genius and that his level of education was not so unique. This Central European, and he alone, assigns such a sublime meaning and such exceptional content to the world and life that he not only beautifies life, but he also even exceeds the conceptions of ancient Greek classical education and humanistic tradition, which does not, however, correspond to anything inexistence.
If one accepts the more rationalistic of the two explanations, one must say that Dienach’s texts are pages of applied futuristic sociology and an optimistic perspective in metaphysics. Some of the writer’s convictions are quite characteristic. We present them directly below.
Dienach does not foster the slightest appreciation for human cognitive abilities. He even considers a priori perceptions of the mind, for instance, time, space and classifications, too narrowly human. He says that the succession of time periods, yesterday, today, tomorrow, and even the concept of space are what is apparent. They appear to us in this form because they correspond to the perception sensors of human-receivers, to their mental capacities, that is, to their cognitive potential, intellect and rationality. The objective reality of time eludes us. It may very well not be our familiar linear time, with the sequence that we consider rational, with its rational flow, but deep down be an everlasting present. Similar is the case with space. It is impossible for man to perceive anything existing beyond three-dimensional space. There are, however, huge realities, which are included in this notion. For example, the dimension of depth eludes us. According to Dienach, underlying Kant’s simple moral demands of practical reason are excellent and unperceived realities, quite real, even though they are not accessible to human intellect. The new faculties, which the Homo Occidentalis Novus managed to acquire, added, as Stephan would tell Dienach, an endless ontological depth to reality, where the once moral demands of the old cognitive-theoretical version are included.
Objective ontological reality suffers no harm—it is just we that are incapable of perceiving it—because the perception sensors, the mind, human reason happens to be finite and imperfect. An objective being suffers no harm because the entire cognitive and psychic human structure, the entire rational organisation, happens to be weak by nature. In exactly the same way, for instance, ultraviolet and infrared rays suffer no harm regarding their objective existence and reality because the perception abilities of the human vision sensors happen to be inadequate.
He disapproves of the rise of rationality to an almighty cognitive power. He does not agree that human intellect is the only safe origin of spiritual life or that the cognitive function is the highest or that only what is acceptable by means of rational proof is related to ontological reality.
Regarding all science, if one excludes mathematics, as he says, Dienach has doubts about whether it gives us the real, objective picture of the natural universe. He stresses its fluid nature and speaks not of one natural science that is the most objectively valid—as it was believed in the 19th century—but of many subjective natural sciences, one for each different period. He considers the achievements of physics very useful to our empirical knowledge, their technical applications in the various fields of natural sciences and to the progress of material culture, but not to the knowledge of the true nature of beings. Fate has not provided us with the key to perceiving their objectivity. Our knowledge of all this is too human by definition. The proper knowledge of actual Being goes beyond our potential. As was the above mentioned case of the colour rays in the solar spectrum, such is the case here as well with the perception of the natural universe: for the living beings that humans are, senses are tools within nature, but also barriers. Our mental capacities, our knowledge potential, intellect, rationality, are tools within the worlds of existing things for the biological species of rational beings to which we belong, but they are also obstacles.
Dienach considers even the distinction between physics and metaphysics entirely human. It is the sensory perception of this particular biological species and its finite cognitive potential that limit them. We no longer live, he says, in the times of Aristoteles, Descartes or Kant, the times of worshipping human intellect and reason, as if these were something unattainable, unique and incomparable. The distinction human intellect has made between physics and metaphysics are subjective (for humans), but not objective. It is impossible, he says, to perceive how much reality (a reality of incredible grandeur and superb beauty), how much ontological validity may underlie all that we have become used to calling “spiritual worlds” a long time ago. The correct definition of this term is, according to Dienach, neither that which has no real ontological substance nor that which only exists in our spirit, but that whose objective existence and nature human-receivers lack the ability to perceive.
For thousands of years we believed humans to be the only species of living beings to have a higher spiritual life, inner cultivation,
inner culture and a free spiritual personality. This erroneous conception of our uniqueness is, according to Dienach, the main reason we consider human cognitive abilities such as intellect and reason so satisfactory—almost infallible according to intellectuals and positivists. He says that this is the main reason we consider the human mind to be omniscient and rationalism to be absolutely valid and we say that if something truly exists, then it is impossible for our intellect not to perceive it.
The level man occupies among myriads of species of intellectual and rational beings is, Dienach says, quite superior. However, man is not the Crown of Creation unless, of course, we limit ourselves to the spiritual and intellectual life of our planet. All humanistic tradition, religious faith, the Greco-Roman spirit and Renaissance had, our author says, passed down to our Western Civilization the unshakable conviction that man is the spiritual centre of the universe. Our whole thinking is egocentric, anthropomorphic and geocentric. Myriads of different biological species are higher than our level and myriads of others are lower. In fact, the utterance “the heavens declare the glory of God” has, he says, meaning and content incomparably broader and higher than the one intended by those expressing it and generally by what people thought at those times. Positivists, intellectuals, empiricists, rationalists and critical philosophers are all mistaken, he says, in considering human perception sensors of imperfect and finite potential to be infallible. They are also wrong to hold that nothing exists apart from what is given and tested by the intellect, rationality and experience. A higher, truly higher, view of the world and life is not feasible, Dienach writes, as long as we continue to look at things exclusively from the human point of view, our own perspective and in light of our own mental capacity.
Another point worth noting in Dienach’s writings is his belief (he saw, he says, and knows) that the cognitive abilities of many other biological species provide an equally subjective image for all that exists—though much more perfect and complete than ours—even if these species are on a higher level than us in the scale of the myriads of species of rational beings. The finite element, he says, is inherent to the inevitable fate of organic matter, no matter how endowed the latter is with the divine spark beyond certain stages of its spiritual development and biological evolution. When the spirit comes to embrace matter, you cannot, he says, ever find perfection. There is no perfection in any of those creatures that are superior to us, in any of their functions corresponding to what we are used to calling ‘mind’, ‘reason’ and psychic-intellectual functions. They are also burdened by the fate of understanding only the apparent facets of reality, he says. In other words, they also have their own worldview, which they supposedly consider real due to their limited ability of ontological perception; in the same way, we have our own physical-scientific worldview, which we owe to Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg and the rest of our wise personages.
The most wondrous thing he writes about is that actual Being exists, the deeper essence of Being, that is, the objective and no longer the apparent reality. This Being exists beyond the thousands of subjective images in the field of ontology and generally in the sphere of knowledge and beyond all kinds of perceptions, which vary incredibly on those myriads of inhabited spheres and in the incredible breadth of time periods spanning millions of centuries. They vary, he says, depending on the level of the species of logical beings and even on the particular stage of their biological and spiritual development along with the various developmental stages of their psychic-spiritual functions. Human language cannot express this inconceivably large ontological reality, of course. Dienach, however, employs a term: the Samith. He actually believes that this term is not conventional, but it is a specific word of a peculiar language of the wise of those distant future times he discusses.
Let us suppose that one of the superior species of rational living beings somewhere in cosmic space could ever grasp the entire true nature of this objective ontological reality, its essence, its structure, its entire ontological content. Then, he says, we would immediately solve all the big and unknown problems of the world, a small part of which constitutes, also here on our Earth, an objective of our metaphysical pain, an object, that is, of unbearable spiritual thirst, of irresistible nostalgia of spirit and soul. These problems are the natural universe in its objective nature, the existence of God, the beginning and the end of beings, the deep mystery of life and its purpose, all sorts of teleological opinions, eternity and infinity. Moreover, the thousands of questions in metaphysics, the origins and the destination of people as well as their place in the entirety of Being, everything we hopelessly strive to understand, everything inconceivable but existing, of ontological substance, no matter how much it eludes the abilities of human intellect and the perception sensors of rationalism.
Dienach believes that it is feasible for superior living beings to have knowledge, not of the Samith’s essence, of course, which is impossible, but at least of its evident existence. He even says this could be feasible by people, though in the very distant future, upon long-lasting self-cultivation of the psychic-spiritual abilities of our species and an evolutionary course of a more moral nature.
This knowledge of Samith’s existence would suffice, according to Dienach, to put an end to man’s metaphysical angst and save the human spirit from the eternal fate of pain and doubt. Despite its inaccessible essence, the all-so-clear knowledge of the existence of that large ontological reality, which objectively exists, could not come to the chosen ones among us, to those whom fate would have given the divine grace of actually witnessing its existence. It could not come but in connection with that meaning of incredible and inconceivable grandeur and with the feeling of hyper- cosmic beauty it encompasses.
“Do not take these last words with their human meaning,” Dienach writes in some footnotes. “Alas,” he says, “upon hearing the word ‘grandeur’, we think of space, of range. The same applies for hyper-cosmic beauty, which is something beyond the limits of human psychic tolerance to great aesthetic joy and superb spiritual happiness and besides, something entirely inaccessible to the poor and finite perception potential of human aesthetic consciousness. Maybe, however, it is an unintentional foretelling. Maybe it is a distant reflection of it, which had once feebly shone in Goethe’s or Beethoven’s dreams and in those of other masters of artistic creation and philosophical thinking during the heyday of the European civilisation.
I recall Dienach writing somewhere else in his manuscripts, which were later lost, about Kant’s distinction between the beautiful (for example, in the great and immortal works of artistic creation and the perception of beauty by the cultivated lover of the arts) and the sublime (for example, at the sight of the starry dome and at the perception of the sublime by the sensitive religious person of advanced inner cultivation and rich spiritual culture). I also recall Dienach writing further down about Kant’s observation that the former causes deep aesthetic stirring while the latter brings about a sense of wonder and profound religiousness as well as a feeling of awe and veneration.
I remember Dienach not admitting to such a distinction, but, on the contrary, giving a single explanation for all this: he writes somewhere that an unbearable thirst of the soul pushes us towards these concepts. The Samith, however, is, deep down, the object of our nostalgia. Lacking it, we resort to all those things that give our spiritual world the impression of its worldly forms. They somehow grant us—though temporarily—some salvation from the unquenched thirst for the Samith within our own ambience of life. That is all we have in the cruel fate of our world.
Besides, Dienach continues, this need for salvation is the reason religions were established in the first place. Men feel that life is impossible without a religious feeling. This salvation is also pursued by artistic, and generally, creation in its various forms (composition of symphonic music, lyrical poetry, visual arts, treasures of the spirit in general). The same reason led to the construction, through the millennia, of an
entire spiritual edifice of meritocratic convictions and high ideals (such as humanism, love, justice, altruism, freedom, education, and the spiritual urge towards moral completion). This need for salvation is the reason men became capable of expressing sublime moral demands to their Creator and suffering, fighting, sacrificing themselves, dying—without an ulterior motive, in the spirit of voluntary sacrifice—for high emotional and moral values. All this to quench, as much as possible—even temporarily—that unsatisfied, sacred thirst of the spirit and soul. The deepest reason, the true origins of the entire civilisation throughout history is this unrelenting spiritual tendency, this urge for salvation from the pain from the lack of the Samith, unconscious though we may be of it.