In 1896 I had an experience, the inner workings and causes of which are so difficult to see that one would have to construct a far-reaching system to explain it completely. It is not connected with the dreams I have been discussing, but more with commands that one takes with one into one’s deep sleep — rather like the case where I appeared to my wife by telepathy. I will describe it here simply because it was so odd.
At the time I was in regular correspondence with an Indian swami who lived in Mayavati in the Himalaya area and edited a little newspaper — Prabudha Bharata — devoted to the Ramakrishna movement. In the course of our correspondence the swami described a Tibetan method, involving magic, of compelling a thief by telepathy to return a stolen object. The method consisted of drawing a certain geometrical figure on paper before going to bed, imagining a vision of the desired object in the middle of it until one could see it clearly in one’s mind’s eye, then burning the piece of paper, imagining that would send the geometrical figure into the astral realm, where it would capture, so to speak, the stolen or lost object.
When the swami’s letter reached me, I had just lost a meerschaum cigar holder; I suspected it had been stolen by my office messenger. In the way that we often become obsessed with recovering things of no value, I spent six weeks desperately looking for the cigar holder. Out of interest I followed the instructions the Indian had sent me. I did not in the least believe it would work, it was basically curiosity that led me to follow the instructions carefully. A few days passed — I had long since forgotten the matter — and, as usual, I set off home at lunchtime. It was my habit to do this at one o’clock, but that day I didn’t leave until two, without there being any reason for the delay. Also on that day I did not take my usual short cut, a public passage through a building, but chose to go by a very busy, wide street, even though it was farther. I had no thought of the meerschaum holder. I could not go particularly quickly because of the crowd, so I walked along behind two men who were in lively conversation. I wasn’t listening and, anyway, they were speaking Czech, so I wouldn’t have understood. Suddenly one of them stopped, forcing me to stop for a moment. He took an object out of his pocket and held it out to the other. It was a black leather case that seemed strangely familiar. He opened it and the other looked inside. To my immense astonishment, I saw that it was my cigar holder. I wondered what to do. By this time the two had separated. I followed one of them, wrongly assuming he had taken the case. When we reached a deserted street corner, I stopped him and told him I had lost the cigar holder and since I was fond of it, I would like to buy it back from him. I assured the man, who was fairly shabbily dressed, that I wouldn’t dream of demanding it back for nothing. As I handed him a tip, the man insisted I was mistaken, the other had put the case back in his pocket. Still, he told me he would get the holder for me quickly since the other man had offered to sell it to him. They were going to meet that afternoon at four, the man having offered to sell him other things, in the courtyard of an inn and he suggested I should be there too. Naturally I was there punctually. The two of them arrived a few minutes later. With an apparently innocent conversation the shabbily clad one got the other to show him the cigar holder again. When the man took it out of his pocket, I pounced like a hawk. There was a short exchange, but when the ‘finder’ realised I had no intention of taking him to the police, as he might have feared, he became extremely friendly, pocketed the money I offered with a satisfied grin and told me he had found it six weeks ago in a box of the concert hall of the Grand Hotel, where he worked as a waiter. Since no one had reported it as lost, he thought he was justified in keeping it.
Since I would have liked to find out what circumstances had made the man go along Obststrasse at two that afternoon, I asked him all sorts of questions relating to that. Naturally the waiter found that strange, perhaps even dubious; whatever the case, he became very suspicious and eventually somewhat tart, at which I took my leave of him. But at least I had recovered my cigar holder in this bizarre way. Should I take it as the effect of the Tibetan magic diagram? I wondered. It could have been a coincidence. I decided to do a second experiment. For a long time I had not been able to find a walking stick I had which was shaped like a golf club and assumed I’d left it somewhere. Once more I drew the geometrical figure and imagined the golf-club walking stick in the middle of it. The next morning the stick was lying across a chair in my apartment. The maid swore she had not put it there and no one else could tell me anything either. But of course the stick could not have been lying for weeks on the chair I used every day.
This time it could hardly have been a coincidence. I decided to try it out a third time and waited for an opportunity where a successful outcome would be almost definitely out of the question. One soon presented itself. At that time I lived close by the Moldau, in a house built onto a mill. The eastern wall was washed by a raging arm of the river which shot out from the millrace there. When pruning a pot plant one day the scissors — a very old family heirloom of curious design which came from my grandfather — fell out of the open window into the river.
This time, I thought, the Tibetan magic is surely going to fail, but I still went through with the experiment, just to see. What then happened was incredible, a sheer impossibility! I was literally shattered. One morning the scissors were back on my desk! For a moment I thought I must be going out of my mind. Then I told myself: it’s probably your memory that’s at fault and you dropped a quite different pair of scissors out of the window. I immediately went to the kitchen and asked the maid, ‘Did you put this pair of scissors on my desk’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘When?’
‘Yesterday evening, when you were out, sir.’
‘Where did you find them?
‘Johann, the miller’s apprentice, brought them. He said we’d probably dropped them in the river.’
‘But how could the fellow have got them out of the deep millrace. Was he fishing there and if so, why?’
‘No, the millrace was drained yesterday and is dry; the miller closed the sluice gate because there’s something broken on the wheel,’ the girl explained. ‘That’s probably when Jan found the scissors. I could ask him.’
I looked out of the window: there was no water in the millrace; it was full of tins and broken glass.
All that was mere chance? Impossible! Out of the question. I was so excited that on that same day I told all my friends what had happened. They as good as laughed in my face. They were naturally convinced I’d made it up. My assurances made no difference, people prefer to believe someone’s lying than to accept baffling events — the conclusions they would be compelled to draw are too uncomfortable for them.
Even today I have no real explanation of what things might have played a part in these experiences. There are possible explanations in the case of the cigar holder: telepathic vibrations could have brought the waiter and myself together at the same moment in the crowded street; remarkable enough, but still possible. In the case of the scissors that seems to be out of the question. One can hardly assume that I broke a millwheel by unconsciously using magic! And if the wheel hadn’t been broken, the miller wouldn’t have drained the millrace.
When, years later, I told my friend Lall about these experiences, he said that it had all been done by certain elemental beings. Tibetan diagrams such as the one I had been given forced them to obey. ‘Superstition, of course,’ the enlightened European will say. Call it superstition if you like, but how can it produce such astonishing effects? Naturally I tried out the method lots more times — and it always failed! Lall explained that this was because I had told other people about it, especially hostile sceptics, which I should never have done. That restored freedom to the elemental beings and the diagram lost its magic. Incidentally, the scissors suffered the same sad fate as the car: they were burnt. That is, one day they fell into the kitchen stove fire and were no longer usable. Presumably the ‘elementals’ are strict about venting their anger on objects they have b
een involved with.
To return to the second fakir I mentioned, the one hanging head down from a tree that I had seen in an illustration in Campbell Oman’s book. There was a picture of the fakir standing on one leg in Schmidt’s book on fakirism and, as I have said, it helped me to develop the balance exercise. It was not so easy to copy the man hanging head down and I do not think the exercise would have produced any significant effect, it was just a piece of manifest nonsense for public consumption. I can only guess at what it is meant to say but, using hints from Indian books, I would put it this way: in the course of their development through yoga a person gradually acquires a different polarity from ordinary people. Perhaps the word ‘polarity’ is inaccurate but how can I describe a process of which I know as good as nothing?
Today we have no idea whether the ancient Indians had any precise knowledge of the law of gravity, or whether Newton really was the first person to discover it. However, it is safe to assume that the old Orientals — the Chinese above all — will have wondered why all things are bound to the earth and only birds and insects can fly. Away from the ground and free! That will surely have been what they desired, at least the ascetics and yogis. And if there was then a case like that of the Catholic monk of San Vito who, it is reported, fell into a trance before thousands of people while praying and floated up to the dome of the church (there are reports of hundreds of similar cases!), then there is no doubt that primitive investigators would have pondered how something like that could be explained apart from through the intervention of a demon or a god. That will especially have been the case among the ancient Egyptians, since there the caste of priests were also the custodians of science.
It seems very likely that one or another of them would have had the idea of seeing whether hanging head down would produce results as far as levitation was concerned. Perhaps these experiments led to the popular belief that they were the real key to controlling the desired phenomena. I believe that if hanging upside down for a long time is to be successful, that will not happen through the purely mechanical execution but only if it is accompanied by spiritual notions, such as I observed in standing upright and keeping my balance. It is also possible that some fakirs practise hanging upside down to produce physiological changes caused by the rush of blood to the head. Certain other fakir exercises are aimed at increasing the flow of blood to the head, for example slowly inhaling followed by exhaling as violently as possible. It can presumably be taken as proven that these and similar violent methods serve the sole purpose of inducing trance. That is, they are steps in the opposite direction to the one someone should take if they want to go forward on the path of development.
To sum up briefly: development and advancement lie in the ever greater heightening of consciousness, not in interrupting, shifting or reducing it. Although yoga and everything that comes into that area may look like hothouse nurture, in my opinion such accelerated growth is not at all unnatural but rather the most important thing one can strive for as long as one is here on earth. ‘The sole deed that is worth accomplishing,’ as the Indian books say.
To move on to the third fakir, the one who spends his whole life with his thumb pressed into the palm of his hand until the nail grows through. Why? What did the one who first did the exercise have in mind? He certainly can’t have done it off the top of his head! The following explanation suggests itself: In earlier times and still today among savages, and even among Muslims, a madman is regarded as holy. Hystero-epilepsy gives the impression a person suffering from it is mad. As is well known, Mohammad was an epileptic. When epileptics have a fit, they turn their thumbs inwards, but not only that, they also bend their tongue backwards into their gullet. Once when I saw that happen, the question that immediately came to mind was: do fakirs also swallow their tongue? I tried to find out myself, but it was the swami in Myavati who eventually confirmed my suspicion. He wrote, ‘I am very well acquainted with this fakir sect from my time in Amritsar; they constantly perform Kechari Mudra (swallowing the tongue).’ So I was right, they copied the outward side-effects of epilepsy. I cannot say whether by that they manage to become epileptics but it is certainly not inconceivable, if one bears in mind that the opposite is possible, namely that one can bring an epileptic fit to an end by releasing the person’s thumb and forcing their tongue back into its natural position.
Patanjali’s rules for Raja Yoga indicate that even in ancient times they had discovered a law of nature which one could express roughly as follows: physiological effects can, if copied physically, create the causes which originally produced them; it is, then, possible to invert cause and effect. For example: taking slow, deep breaths results in calmness of thought; conversely, calmness of thought and concentrating one’s attention automatically results in deep breathing. This example alone is a valuable key to practical magic, though a person lacking imagination will not put it in the lock, never mind turn it.
For a while I was satisfied with the explanation that the fakir sect turned their thumbs inwards simply in order to induce epilepsy, but then I asked myself why they held their thumbnail against the palm of their hand. Natural epileptics just hold their thumbs clenched in their fist. So there was a small difference! A primitive way of producing stigmas, was the thought that suddenly occurred to me and I suspect I was on the right track. Could the exercise be related to the Jesus legend? I immediately wrote to my friend in Myavati asking how old the thumb mudra might be and whether it arose about the time of the death of Christ. The answer came a few months later: ‘I have made extensive enquiries; it was already known at the time of the Buddha and even then — several hundred years before Christ — was part of the hatha yogis’ repertoire.’ Is it then the stigmas the sect is trying to acquire and not just a state of epileptoid processes? Perhaps both. That stigmatics do not need food, neither liquid nor solid, to stay alive is something that has been established not only in the case of the present-day Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth, but also in very many earlier cases. An amazing phenomenon, for which doctors have found a very elaborate ‘explanation’, but still a phenomenon which none of those who starve themselves as a public show have been able to replicate. Their world record is 68 days fasting, but they all drank water. Clearly, therefore, with the stigmatics it must be spiritual factors that play the key role and produce that ‘transformation of the blood’. It would be wrong to think that stopping taking bodily nourishment is the highest degree of physical change brought about as a result of spiritual processes. Leading English scientists established that when the famous Scottish medium, Daniel Douglas Home, was in a trance, his height reduced or increased by more than a foot. It is only the majority of people, who have no idea what matter really is, who find that strange. Stigmas, blood issuing from the eyes etc. are naturally only side effects of the ability to live without food and not its cause. I am also firmly convinced that the aetiology of this ‘illness’ has nothing to do with the drama on Golgotha. It is simply interpreted in that way by the Church, because there is a certain similarity. An experience I had when I was still a disciple of J… encourages me in this view. As I have already said, my co-disciples showed the beginnings of stigmas. Now at the same time a friend of mine, a doctor at the Prague lunatic asylum who was not a disciple of J…, was doing yoga exercises following Patanjali, thought concentration exercises that had nothing at all to do with the Jesus legend. And lo and behold, he too developed incipient stigmas! Is not the correct conclusion the assumption that stigmas are the outward sign of a change taking place in the body that appear when a particular stage of development has been reached? A stage similar to Mohammad’s vision of the white horse. And if it really is a law of nature relating to physiology, it would explain at a stroke the point of the thumb exercise of the fakir sect: producing bodily changes.
As I have said, it is futile to attempt to influence the wheel of fate by putting one’s heart and soul into one’s outward profession. Covering the shadow on the wall with whitewash, I called it. The value of
such professional keenness is no greater than that of its opposite, the life of a tramp. Unless, that is, ‘something extra comes from above’. If a manufacturer of braces makes his business more profitable by reducing his expenses, what, at best, will be the result? He will acquire a fortune which his son will inherit and his grandson squander, as is usual. What does the man get out of it? Nothing but chaff! But that doesn’t just apply to people in the braces business, it applies to everyone! Differences in value are only outward show. Seen from above, a grassy plain and an alpine forest are just patches of green. If, however, something extra comes ‘from above’ — for the braces manufacturer as for Alexander the ‘Great’ — the picture immediately changes. What was previously worthless at once becomes meaningful, a way to the goal. What I call this ‘from above’ is learning to understand what the Masked Figure intends by imposing our fate on us. Anyone who does not acquire this kind of seeing and hearing is like a child that goes to school but does not realise it should pay attention. In such cases every day is wasted. It would be better to play truant and become a tramp!
Notes
10 Meyrink is mistaken here. The pia mater is not the same as the cerebral cortex, but a soft membrane surrounding it. The name is translated from Arabic and means ‘gentle mother’ in contrast to the dura mater — ‘hard mother’.
11 English translation: J Kerning: Esoteric Education or the Unfoldment and Life of a Hero, Kessinger Publishing, 2006 (originally: Esoteric Publishing Co, Boston, 1888); it appears to be the only work by Kerning to appear in English.
The Dedalus Meyrink Reader Page 19