The Dedalus Meyrink Reader

by Gustav Meyrink

  As far as is possible for someone living now whom destiny compels to live in the world, I have tried out both systems in practice and have come to the conclusion that the two methods complement each other, though only if one does not follow them literally but grasps the meaning hidden behind the words. What the Kabbalah (esoteric Jewish doctrine) says about the Bible is also valid here: ‘Damned is he who takes the scriptures literally.’

  The following incident clearly shows that the Indian fakirs — in most cases at least — follow the Hatha Yoga Pradipika literally and are led astray by it (or at best, or worst, to mediumism): Colonel Olcott, one of the founders of the Theosophical Society, went on a study trip to the famous ruined city of Karli, an ancient place where fakirs and hatha yogis gather. An aged ascetic came up to him, threw himself to the ground at his feet and begged Olcott to take him to an initiate, for he had sought in vain for one his whole life through. Just imagine: he had been a fakir from his youth and asked a European for advice in an area which is supposed to be the jewel in India’s crown!

  What do we conclude from this? There are books and oral traditions in Asia, but only very few people can read, that is, understand them. I have already mentioned that joining J…’s spiritual school not only affected me inwardly but also changed my outward destiny. Of course, I cannot prove my life would not have followed the same course if I had not performed J…’s exercises; such a thing is impossible to prove! I am not alone in the opinion that yoga, performed seriously and fervently, will start a person’s outward destiny moving at a rapid pace. Indians say that anyone who practises the Gavatri (hymn to the ‘sun’) every morning and is not pure and does not know the rite of the Rigveda exactly, will be torn to pieces. Many examples from history are quoted. What happened to me was similar. As if a horde of demons had been let loose on me, my life turned into a succession of misfortunes until I sometimes felt close to ultimate despair. The illness of the spinal cord I mentioned was one of the softest blows of fate. Just as that has finally disappeared almost entirely, all the rest turned out to be bluff on the part of fate. Pointless then? Oh no! Everything would have been pointless had I not kept on asking myself, again and again, ‘Why?’ Naturally a so-called clever person would say, ‘If you had lived a nice quiet life as a respectable citizen and not as a crazy yogi and — admit it — as a bit of a rake, you’d have kept your health, acquired an imposing paunch and a three-foot long gold watch-chain to go with it and…’ — and could ask yourself on your deathbed, ‘What, actually, was the point of my life?’That, at least, would be my conclusion to his little speech.

  Fortunately things turned out differently for me. I overcame the spinal illness, but that result was of secondary importance, the way I got rid of it through yoga, that was the key thing for me. I will describe later what the method I discovered consisted of so that one or other of you will be able to profit from it. That is the only reason why I am writing this. Some will feel I am taking up arms against religion and piety. I wouldn’t dream of it! Without religion most people would stumble into an abyss and collapse like cripples whose crutches had been knocked away from under them. My book has been written solely for those who want to walk upright. Moreover, yoga is, as the word itself says, religion = union; union not with a god, however, but with something that is very ‘godlike’ (if you insist) — with the Being everyone ought to be; with the Being one actually is without realising, blinded and mutilated by schizophrenia as we are.

  In order to get a thorough understanding — and to see the weaknesses — of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika I have mentioned, it is necessary to be familiar to a certain extent with the different Indian systems which it appears to bring together in an integrated unity. Superficial readers will get the impression that it was written by domineering priests, who want to maintain the respect in which their caste is held both here and in the world beyond by promises of earthly prosperity. It contains formulas for becoming master over the ‘three worlds’ or as beautiful as Indra and so on; they consist of precepts telling you how long you must hold your breath (at least two hours a day) and many other things that seem equally impossible in order to achieve this. I do not doubt for one moment that one can acquire all this by these methods, but other people will not notice the change in a person who has been thus transformed into a Croesus or an Apollo! No more than one can see the beautiful dreams of an opium smoker. Another flight from reality, then, is what is being taught, and the most stupid one possible into the bargain. If you read reports about certain occult phenomena performed by yogis and sanyassis, for example the levitation of the yogi Govinda Swami, of which Jakolliot talks, you do wonder whether the promises of the Hatha Yoga Padipika shouldn’t be taken literally after all. But we should not let ourselves be deceived when there are sometimes phenomena associated with hathayogis which go beyond the realm of subjective perception and become visible for onlookers as well. It simply means that the fakir in question is nothing other than a spiritualist medium, as Govinda himself admitted when he said, ‘I myself can do nothing, it is the spirits of the departed who do everything.’And it is beyond doubt that one can become mediumistic by staring uninterruptedly at the end of one’s nose, as the instructions prescribe; after all the Scotsman, James Braid, proved that fixing one’s gaze like that induces self-hypnosis. When the fakir Hari Das, who, as Dr Honigberger reported, was buried alive for months, was asked what he had felt while his body was under the earth, said, ‘My soul roamed in wonderful regions.’ That means that Hari Das contrived a ‘leaving’ of his body such as was taught, in my opinion, in the mysteries of the Ancient Greeks. Something similar can be observed in the howling dervishes of the Near East during their ecstasies (literally ecstasy means ‘displacement’), although it is not so complete, for they retain a little of their waking consciousness and do not become corpselike, rigid and cold like Hari Das; a certain progress in my opinion, but far from ideal, for that would consist of being in possession of both one’s waking and one’s metaphysical consciousness at the same time, without heightening one at the expense of the other. A friend who had lived among the dervishes for a long time told me that certain Arab dervish sheikhs do achieve that. I have no means of checking whether it is true or not, but I imagine that even they will not achieve anything worthwhile in the sense I have always had in mind — that is having an effect here and not ‘on the other side’. They are all theists, what they experience is a god and not themselves. Escape from reality via a kind of schizophrenia.

  In order to have a clear awareness of this side and the other side at the same time, one would have to start by being clear about the process of normal sleep — that is what I told myself when I had read enough about yoga and reports of fakirs, yogis and dervishes. Suddenly sleep, such an everyday occurrence in the lives of all creatures, seemed extremely suspicious and significant. I decided to carry out some experiments. Making an effort of will to keep sleep at bay for a few nights led nowhere, as I soon realised. Moreover there are enough cases reported in the medical literature which prove that a long absence of sleep, brought about by an injury to some part of the brain, does not cause any significant change in people. Two remarkable experiments which were successful took me a few steps farther towards understanding that sleep can make it possible for someone to ‘leave’ their body, or at least to produce an effect at a distance without physical contact. They convinced me that the old claim of clairvoyants, that that is the case, was highly probable.

  Once I read in an old tome on the occult: ‘When the earthly person closes their eyes, the heavenly one opens them, and vice versa.’Also: ‘Thoughts we take with us into sleep become realities.’ I immediately tried it out. I had a friend, Artur von Rimay, whom I saw a lot at the time and who, like me, was keen to pursue metaphysical problems, and I went to bed with the firm intention of going to sleep and sending him a telekinetic sign by hitting a table in his apartment with a stick. In order to do this and the better to visualise the autosuggestion, I took a walking s
tick to bed with me, holding it tight while I tried to get to sleep. It is exceptionally difficult to fall asleep on command if you haven’t practised it for a long time; your thoughts keep wandering, pushing aside the intention you have set yourself. It is my belief that the Stymphalian birds in the legend of Hercules symbolise thoughts — they can only be killed with an iron arrow. Contrary to expectation, however, and helped by a chance occurrence supported by the obedience of my heartbeat, I managed to fall asleep all at once. It was a short, deep, completely dreamless sleep that was almost like a faint. I woke up a few minutes later feeling as if my heart were standing still; at the same time I felt convinced my experiment had succeeded.

  I could hardly wait for morning. As usual my friend came to see me at about ten. I waited to see if he would tell me anything. In vain. He spoke about all sorts of things except any kind of nocturnal happenings. After a while I asked him shyly ‘Did you have any dreams last night, or something —’

  ‘Was that you?’ he broke in. I listened to his tale without interrupting him at all. He said, ‘Last night, shortly before one’ — the time corresponded to that of my experiment to the minute! — ‘I suddenly woke up, startled by a noise in the next room, as if someone were hitting the table with a flail at regular intervals. When it got louder and louder, I jumped out of bed and hurried to the other room. The blows could clearly be heard to come from the large table in the middle of the room. But there was nothing to be seen. A few minutes later my mother and the old housekeeper in their nightdresses came dashing in, terrified. After a while the noise grew quieter and quieter and eventually died away completely. We just shook our heads and went back to bed.’

  That was the story told by my friend, Artur von Rimay. (He is living in Vienna at present and can confirm that what I have written here is the absolute truth.) ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this straight away?’ I asked. ‘It really is strange enough.’

  ‘The only explanation I can give,’ he answered hesitantly, ‘is that the strong impression the experience made on me faded while I slept afterwards. It seems so far away from me now I could almost say I just dreamt it — if I hadn’t discussed it with my mother only a few hours ago. Tell me, did you really make it happen by telekinesis?’ To prove it I handed him a piece of paper on which I had made notes during the night of everything I had done.

  However strange the incident was in itself, what seemed more significant to me was the fact that it remained in the memory in a way that was disconcertingly different from, for example, an interesting natural, even an everyday experience. It would be more normal for something so exceptional to etch itself much more deeply on the memory. Would a mechanical membrane have recorded the noise of the blows on the table? Most people would say no, but I believe it would have. As far as I am concerned, similar observations much later — years later — in Levico in the South Tyrol, where I witnessed so-called ghostly manifestations, confirm that such happenings are objective and not simply subjective and certainly not peculiar hallucinations. The things I experienced in Levico — I will perhaps describe them in another place — were vivid, even fantastic, but I have to keep on visualising them in my mind’s eye if I do not want them to vanish without trace from my memory. I could put it this way: it is as if I had experienced them a century ago, and not in this life. ‘Quite, because they never actually happened,’ the superficial doubting Thomas will object. No, they did happen! Not only are there many witnesses still alive, the events were put down in writing the following day. What eliminates all doubt is the fact that physical changes took place in objects, for example a wall in a room collapsed accompanied by a kind of explosion. The wall had to be rebuilt! One of the eye witnesses has the receipt for the work. (Clearer proof can hardly be necessary, even for a professor of science!)

  Despite all this there is unquestionably a faint resemblance to what we call a hallucination in both cases. The only explanation I can find is that everything we beings experience through the senses is a hallucination, as the philosophy of the Indian Upanishads maintains; everything: the external world and dreams, feverish fancies, visions and the like. The fact that objects remain even when the person perceiving them dies or goes to sleep does not prove the contrary. Anyone who can think logically will easily work it out. What people call objective and what they call subjective are so intermingled in such subtle gradations that it will always give the impression that one thing is ‘real’ and another not. If the differences are small, in our amazement we allow ourselves to be confused.

  My second experience of telekinesis took place in the following way: during the first stages of the spinal illness I have mentioned I was on a train between Dresden and Pirna around midday. I suddenly remembered to my horror that in a letter to my fiancée, now my wife, which I had already posted, I had forgotten to say something that was extremely important for our future. What it was I cannot say here, since it concerned a private matter, but it was a matter of decisive importance for us. Sending a telegram was out of the question for various reasons. What could I do? I broke out in a cold sweat. It was impossible to find any way to save the situation. Then I recalled the experiment I had done with my friend Artur von Rimay. What had been successful once might work a second time. No, it simply had to work, it was a matter of all or nothing for us. So I told myself: you must appear to ‘her’, you must raise your hand in warning, must tell her by thought transference what it is about and what she must do. I therefore expressed my instructions in clear words which I visualised as written down. Then: fall asleep quickly, go in spirit to Prague and appear to her in a mirror. (I had assumed, mistakenly as it turned out, that there was a mirror in the room where she was at that moment.) The task I had set myself was so complicated, I thought it was impossible for it to succeed. The faith that was supposed to be so important was anything but present! And then, how was I supposed to fall asleep on command among all these loudly chattering passengers? I could feel my fear and despair growing, I could feel it in the way my heart was hammering wildly. Then I remembered the saying that had come to me on the stone bench by the Moldau: ‘Things come from the heart, are born of the heart and subject to the heart’ and had to suppress a cry of triumph. What need did I have of ‘faith’ and other recipes that sound as if they came from a cookery book: ‘Take a hundred eggs…’ (‘Take’, oh yes, but where from?) Calm my heart down, that was something I could do, it wasn’t some heavenly soap bubble. I sent this cheerful thought down into my chest and after just a few minutes my pulse had slowed down so much that I put it at 40 beats a minute at most. I was overcome with a wonderful sense of calm which wasn’t even disturbed when one of the other passengers asked me a question. I pretended to be asleep and shortly afterwards I fell into a genuine, deep sleep. A few minutes later I woke. As in the previous case, I had no memory of whether the experiment had succeeded or not. What I did have, however, was such a feeling of triumph that any further doubt or worry was impossible. I called up all sorts of doubts because I was interested to see if they would come. In that situation nothing would have been more natural than for them to fall on me like wild beasts. Strangely enough, it was as if they had been exterminated. There is an inner certainty which cannot be anything other than the consequence of something that has become irrevocable fact in one’s sleep. This inner certainty we can call ‘living’ faith and everything one believes in that way will inevitably happen. It is, however, a most profound error to imagine it will work the other way round and one can make something happen through faith. Anyone who thinks that is confusing cause and effect!

  As soon as I was back in Prague, I hurried off to see my fiancée. The thought transfer had worked perfectly. She told me, ‘In the afternoon at the time you said, about half an hour after lunch, I had lain down on the divan and gone to sleep. Suddenly I felt I was being shaken and woke up. My eye fell on a polished cupboard beside the sofa. In its shiny surface I saw you standing there, a figure about eighteen inches high. You had your hand raised in warning.
Immediately after that you’d vanished again. I racked my brains to work out what it was you wanted, but I couldn’t. One hour later it occurred to me that I was to go down to the entrance hall and wait for the postman. When he came, I took a letter from him. I was just in time, otherwise it would have fallen into the hands of someone for whom it was not intended.’

  There are two main aspects that make this case particularly interesting: there was no mirror in the room, so I appeared in the shiny polish of a piece of furniture; that meant I had thought about what I was doing and used my reason. If I had left my body, as a spiritualist would assume, such purposeful action would not have been that remarkable. However, that explanation does not seem very likely to me. One point against it is that as a reflection I wasn’t dressed the same as in the train, I was wearing a white coat instead, the way ordinary people or children imagine ghosts. Moreover the Shabhavas, an Indian sect of very ancient origin who follow a meticulously designed method in order to be able to leave their bodies, say that when one really leaves one’s body physically it results in rigor mortis and one’s limbs turn icy cold. The body of the person concerned cannot come back to life on its own, someone else must do that by massaging their skin and placing some hot dough on the top of their head. Something of the kind happened with the fakir Hari Das, whom Dr Honigberger wrote about some 50 years ago. Now it is absolutely out of the question that I should have fallen into a state of catalepsy on the train; my fellow passengers would have been bound to have noticed.