The Dedalus Meyrink Reader

by Gustav Meyrink

  Once I had more or less got over my astonishment, I told myself that I had probably exhaled without realising. Later I repeated the experiment, determined to observe myself closely this time. For a long time I was unsuccessful, for to hold one’s breath for two and a half, not to mention three minutes, it is essential — for me at least — not only to act on the lungs with one’s physical muscles but also to ‘stop one’s thoughts’ in a particular way. Now is it hardly possible to fix one’s thoughts and observe oneself at the same time. Still, I believe I convinced myself, when the disappearance of the air from my lungs occurred once more, that I had indeed not breathed out. My friend Lall had expressly warned me against breathing exercises; they always ended in incurable disease, he said, or death before one’s body was ready for it. Not knowing how to prepare my body, I decided, despite his warning, to try to find out through my own efforts whether I was ready. So I started off with the aforementioned exercises, just in case. However, I abruptly broke them off, for insistent warnings began to float in my consciousness in the form of unequivocal visionary images. They came a little too late. I immediately suffered from such a striking lack of imagination and of the ability to work as a writer, that I felt I had been mentally robbed. For a long time I couldn’t write anything at all. I was so lethargic that for months I couldn’t bring myself to leave the house; I sat in an armchair from morning to evening, brooding. I felt tired of life and it gnawed at me until I was almost in despair. In addition I felt unbearably thirsty. Diabetes? I asked myself. I didn’t have the courage to have a medical examination. What despicable cowardliness we humans are capable of!

  Then my wife urged me to go to the doctor. I didn’t want to, so I went to the chemist. Blood sugar level 8%! A nice mess I’d got myself into! Especially for a hatha yogi who was supposed to become free of all illnesses. And 8%! The Reichsbank can afford such outrageous interest, but not a writer. There was nothing for it — surely destiny was making fun of me — but to eat humble pie and go to the doctor. For two years I followed his advice and lived on nothing but blotting paper, so to speak. True, the sugar stopped, but my weight dwindled too. You’ll be able to levitate after all, I mocked myself. Just a few dozen kilograms less and it’ll be easy. Should I start the breathing exercises again? I asked myself. Perhaps I gave up too soon? Once more a warning from my innermost being. I decided therefore at least to give some thought as to whether there might be a more profound meaning behind Hatha Yoga than the mechanical-seeming surface sense. Gradually it began to dawn on me: the breathing exercises must be seen in a completely different way. After a few months of trials I got to the real meaning.

  Since then I believe I know how the strange positions the fakirs adopt are to be understood and how their effect is to be produced. It became clear to me that they proceed according to formulas that some blind imitator cobbled together in the dim and distant past from the genuine yogis he’d come across. All he’d copied was the outward show. Why does this or that fakir spend his whole life standing on one leg? Why does another hang, head downwards, from the branch of a tree and stay like that for days? Why does a third press his thumb into the palm of his hand until the fingernail grows through the flesh? I imagine I have found the key: standing motionless on one leg — the stylites did something similar (without knowing why, either!) — is a balance exercise. And why exercise balance? I didn’t work out that final puzzle straight away. I solved it by performing the exercise. Naturally I wobbled this way and that, but then — initially it was scarcely noticeable — the sensation of a ‘union’ arose; it is difficult to describe, but I have no other word for it: of a union with myself! Soon I could produce this remarkable sensation without having to stand up. The memory alone reawakened it. And by awakening that strange feeling of union I finally managed to get my diabetes to start to disappear, so that today I can live almost the same life, with no special diet, as a healthy person.

  To be quite honest, I have to mention that shortly before I was cured I happened to take a medicine which was not aimed at the diabetes itself — and it has so far never been prescribed for that purpose — but for a tedious side effect of my diabetes. (If any diabetic would like to try it, it is called Nujol.) It could be that this medicine contributed to my cure, but I do not really believe that myself. The immensely beneficial effect of the balance exercise in all respects — in every last respect, and that is putting it mildly — is so extraordinary that I cannot bring myself to describe it here for fear of weakening the effect of my general remarks in advance. Getting rid of an illness is the least I believe the exercise is capable of.

  How a simple balancing exercise can produce such great effect is the question that will spring to mind. An experienced rock climber with a good head for heights also has a true sense of balance and yet he will get ill at times. Of course, if it were only a matter of balance, the objection would be justified. But it isn’t that simple. Something additional must come ‘from above’, as my late ‘guide’ used to say. Not ‘grace’, no, certainly not that. Destiny doesn’t go in for favouritism. I would like to put it figuratively: our inner person — the Masked Figure hidden, separated from us, alien, totally alien to us in our everyday consciousness — stands upright inside us; it is the spinal cord, the susumna, which is what yoga is all about. Our outer person is separated from it because it is standing askew, ‘askew’ in some sense or other to our inner person. That is why they do not coincide. To put it another way: the broken sword, that is the person with their consciousness limited to earthly things, is not broken crosswise, but lengthwise. (Is there a version of the legend in which Siegfried’s sword is broken lengthwise?) I realised that the purpose of my life was to achieve union, both consciously and instinctively, with the Masked Figure: ‘the Pilot wearing the cloak of invisibility’ I once called it in a story. Whether that is the purpose of everyone’s life, I would not venture to say; it looks as if most people are, for the moment, quite content to head mindlessly for the sea to spawn, like the eels. I can only guess at how my union with the Masked Figure will develop. Such processes move at a very slow pace, stage by stage, and they last for years and years. No one should deceive themself into thinking they have been successful until they have spent a long time testing out the things I have given as examples. Nor would I insist that my experiment is the only hint as to how to go about it. On the contrary, I believe everyone should find out for themselves what the right method is for them. Everyone is ‘ill’ and split in their consciousness in a different way.

  Dreams can often give a hint as to how each individual should proceed in this. Before I got the exercise of finding my balance so that it suited me, I had a significant dream, which was repeated for several nights and for that reason attracted my attention. Dreams are nothing other than visions the sleeping person has; visions that I had and still have are waking dreams and nothing else. In both the sightlines of the eyes shift! Humans and animals have their eyeballs turned upwards when they sleep. Dreams and visions are pointless if we do not learn to train ourselves so that they become our guides. Life itself is pointless if it does not teach us in which direction we should steer the ship of our existence. It is easier than many people think to train yourself to have dreams that are full of meaning. It just takes perseverance, a refusal to give up, a firm, once-and-for-all decision not to stop, ‘even if it should take a million years’. You have to go to bed with the obstinate question in your mind: what meaning will the dream I am expecting have? Children go to bed wanting to dream something nice and their mothers might well encourage this sentimental approach. If you do as I advise, the usual confused tangle of dreams will probably continue for a while, but then order will be established: the Masked Figure is beginning to speak. Mostly in symbols, sometimes however, if a person has a special talent for it, in clear, unmistakable images or even words. If the words are spoken by a figure you see in your dream then you must be extremely wary! It could be a case of a mediumist phenomenon, as deceptive as everything of tha
t kind. Words and acoustic communications in dreams must, if they are to be trusted, sound as if you were saying them to yourself. Anyone who is on the right path to ‘union’ will never see the Masked Figure; how could one see something that is, basically, oneself? It is true that people have sometimes seen their own double — Goethe for example — but a double like that is not the Masked Figure, it is something quite different, which I have no reason to go into in more detail here.

  I dreamt, then, that I was standing on the top of a mountain, the summit of which was just a few square metres of wet, slippery grass. I had an unpleasant feeling of dizziness and had gone down on all fours, like an animal, for fear of losing my footing. I didn’t dare stand up. This dream was repeated several times. Its message was clear, but for a long time I could not see the practical application. I took it in a much too superficial manner, thought it was a trivial warning about how to behave in everyday life. It was that as well, for at that time I was in a situation where I didn’t quite know how to behave. However, the deeper meaning of the dream was: practise in your waking life what you see shown here figuratively. It will take you one step closer to union with your innermost being, which stands eternally upright. Such instructions alone are of genuine value. Anyone who interprets them in too shallow a manner should consider the fairy tale of the soldier who first of all found copper coins in the cave, then silver and finally gold. The more often the dream was repeated, the greater the efforts I made to stand up on the slippery peak, but I just could not manage it.

  Then the dream changed: I was in a room with only one exit, which was directly opposite me. I wanted to go to the door but to do so I would have had to go past a tall pedestal with a huge, venomous snake on it, curled up and ready to strike the moment I came near. This dream was also repeated several times and, as with the first, I could not conquer my fear. There are myths, especially of Oriental origin and in their content occult in the best sense of the word, which say that people are gripped by an unconquerable feeling of fear when a particular stage of their inner development is approaching — like the fear I felt in the dream of the snake. It eventually started to affect my waking consciousness as well and so badly that I decided to try the exercise of getting my heart to stand still, since all the rational methods I employed to calm myself down failed completely. (‘Aha!’ the doctor would say, ‘the side effects of diabetes,’ but he would only be half right.) In this case making my heart stand still produced no effect either. Only when I did the balancing exercise did the feeling of anxiety disappear. Whenever the exercise was successful I monitored my heartbeat — every time it slowed down of its own accord! I felt I had taken a significant step forward, had moved one level higher on the path to the control and transformation of the blood. Strangely enough, this was accompanied by positive changes in my external life: agreeable (instead of the previous disagreeable) developments occurred, as if by chance. By chance! It was a chain of events fitting in with each other in such a remarkable way that the word ‘chance’ seems a cowardly disparagement to please the sceptic. It confirmed the suspicion I had always had that one could change one’s destiny if one only had the right key. I had long since learnt to doubt whether the key was work — work in the sense the layman understands it. Throughout my life I have achieved as good as nothing through work; even though I would not say I was lazy, indolent or incompetent, any advance I made was always through good fortune alone. The only true key to happiness, well-being, health and the like is union with the Masked Figure. That is the one we call providence. That is the one who helps us when our need is greatest. Not some god on his throne above the clouds. Why does the help always come at the last moment? (Everyone has probably had the strange experience that it is always ‘at the last moment’ that ‘something happens’ because we have the wrong (!) kind of self-assurance and not the right kind that comes naturally from becoming one with the Masked Figure. The wrong self-assurance must first of all be pushed aside if the right kind is to appear. This pushing aside is done by our desperate need, unfortunately seldom with lasting effect, for our old self-assurance soon returns. To interpret a story from the Bible symbolically: Christ is asleep in the boat and his disciples wake him when they see the waves are getting alarmingly high.

  There is a German saying that adversity teaches you how to pray; a person who has grasped yoga can add: even greater adversity teaches you to forget prayer. Anyone who is pleading for something will have the same experience as I did in my dream of the summit and the snake. I will recount an incident, that happened to me, which proves that dreams can at times speak clearly and not only in symbols. In 1922 I bought an old car. As often happens, the seller assured me the vehicle was in perfect order; not even his conscience was in perfect order. The car looked horrible and I decided to have the bodywork redone; until then it stayed in a garage to be checked over. When that was done I was going to drive it to a repair shop. Then my wife dreamt that we were driving there and the car suddenly overturned in the ditch on the right; our daughter was dead, she and our son hurt and I seriously injured. Exactly the same the dream was repeated six or seven times. I got my wife to go over the situation in the dream in detail. She described the landscape: ‘And we’re on a steep slope, with trees on either side, you’re driving, our son beside you, my daughter and me in the back when suddenly the car tips, falls down to the right, overturns and we’re all underneath.’

  I found the matter more and more disturbing and didn’t know what to do. The day was approaching when I was to drive the car to the repair shop. I thought it over and had a harebrained idea: I would trick fate. I decided to change things from the way my wife had seen them in her dream. I rang an acquaintance and asked if he would be good enough to drive my car to Garmisch the next day, there were various reasons why I was unwilling to do it myself. My thinking was that if I wasn’t at the wheel myself I was in a way circumventing the prophecy in the dream. (Pretty stupid, the reader will say.) For the same reason I also decided not to take my daughter with us. My acquaintance was happy to do me the favour and it was all agreed.

  At six next morning my acquaintance rang to say that unfortunately he had to call off: during the night a boil had appeared on his neck which was so painful he couldn’t come. I scratched my head: so fate was determined to be right, was it, playing a game of chess with me and thwarting my cunning scheme? In that case we definitely are going to drive there! We’ll see who comes out on top, my friend! I telephoned the repair shop in Garmisch and asked the owner to send his driver. After a lot of shilly-shallying — the man couldn’t come, that kind of thing — I got what I wanted and was promised the driver would arrive in Starnberg by the next train. I went straight to the garage where the car was kept and asked the mechanic to check everything over again.

  ‘Everything’s okay,’ he replied.

  ‘Please have a look at the nearside wheels,’ I asked him, telling him my wife had dreamt the car had toppled over to the right; perhaps there was a fault in the wheels on that side.

  Very reluctantly the mechanic obeyed and removed the rear nearside wheel. ‘What’s this!’ he suddenly exclaimed. ‘The axle stub’s broken. How on earth could I have overlooked that? I could bet it wasn’t like that before.’

  ‘Could that make the car crash?’ I asked. ‘Could the wheel fall off?’

  ‘No, it would never fall off,’ he replied, ‘but it could suddenly lock; if you happened to be driving fast, you could lose control of the steering and naturally you would skid and crash.’

  Just at that moment the driver from Garmisch arrived; I showed him the fault and asked whether he was still prepared to drive us. After a long discussion with the mechanic, he said yes, he was. I sat next to him, on the left, my son and wife in the back, thus going against the dream image. We set off at snail’s pace. One hour later we were approaching Weilheim when my wife suddenly tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, ‘We’re coming to the area I dreamt of.’

  There it was: a downward slope
, trees on both sides. ‘Go even more slowly’, I told the driver.

  ‘Why? We’re going slowly enough as it is, 25 kilometres an hours at most.’

  I insisted: ‘No. Ten at the most, please.’

  The car was just crawling along. Suddenly the driver whispered to me, ‘Can you hear something? What’s that grinding noise at the back?’

  The next moment the car slumped down with a jolt. The driver slammed on the brakes and the car stopped, tilted to the right. A miracle that it hadn’t overturned! Close by on the right-hand side was a deep ditch.

  We got out. The wheel had not come off the axle, but the rim had detached itself — a fault no one would have expected — and, with the tyre and tube still on, was disappearing down the road like a goblin, until it rolled into the ditch.

  Could one not truly say: We outwitted fate?

  If one does not simply take a superficial view of this incident but looks at what is behind it, it becomes so interesting one could erect a whole system of philosophy on it. Even the way destiny insisted on trying to get its own way by — to put it crudely — ‘making’ my acquaintance ill during the night before the journey, so that I would have to drive myself, etc. I am sure destiny has been similarly thwarted at other times over the centuries, causing a stir. No wonder, then, that the belief arose that malign but stupid beings interfere in our lives. Perhaps, who knows, those who support such ‘superstition’ are not entirely wrong. Incidentally, the car had a strange fate. It was burnt in a fire that broke out in the repair shop in Garmisch so that only part of it was still usable.