Memories, Dreams, Reflections

God had also created Adam and Eve in such a way that they had to think what they did not at all want to think. He had done that in order to find out whether they were obedient. And He could also demand something of me that I would have had to reject on traditional religious grounds. It was obedience which brought me grace, and after that experience I knew what God’s grace was. One must be utterly abandoned to God; nothing matters but fulfilling His will. Otherwise all is folly and meaninglessness. From that moment on, when I experienced grace, my true responsibility began. Why did God befoul His cathedral? That, for me, was a terrible thought. But then came the dim understanding that God could be something terrible. I had experienced a dark and terrible secret. It overshadowed my whole life, and I became deeply pensive.

The experience also had the effect of increasing my sense of inferiority. I am a devil or a swine, I thought; I am infinitely depraved. But then I began searching through the New Testament and read, with a certain satisfaction, about the Pharisee and the publican, and that reprobates are the chosen ones. It made a lasting impression on me that the unjust steward was praised, and that Peter, the waverer, was appointed the rock upon which the Church was built.

The greater my inferiority feelings became, the more incomprehensible did God’s grace appear to me. After all, I had never been sure of myself. When my mother once said to me, “You have always been a good boy,” I simply could not grasp it. I a good boy? That was quite new to me. I often thought of myself as a corrupt and inferior person.

With the experience of God and the cathedral I at last had something tangible that was part of the great secret — as if I had always talked of stones falling from heaven and now had one in my pocket. But actually, it was a shaming experience. I had fallen into something bad, something evil and sinister, though at the same time it was a kind of distinction. Sometimes I had an overwhelming urge to speak, not about that, but only to hint that there were some curious things about me which no one knew of. I wanted to find out whether other people had undergone similar experiences. I never succeeded in discovering so much as a trace of them in others. As a result, I had the feeling that I was either outlawed or elect, accursed or blessed.

It would never have occurred to me to speak of my experience openly, nor of my dream of the phallus in the underground temple, nor of my carved manikin. As a matter of fact, I did not say anything about the phallus dream until I was sixty-five. I may have spoken about the other experiences to my wife, but only in later years. A strict taboo hung over all these matters, inherited from my childhood. I could never have talked about them with friends.

My entire youth can be understood in terms of this secret. It induced in me an almost unendurable loneliness. My one great achievement during those years was that I resisted the temptation to talk about it with anyone. Thus the pattern of my relationship to the world was already pre-figured: to-day as then I am a solitary, because I know things and must hint at things which other people do not know, and usually do not even want to know.

In my mother’s family there were six parsons, and on my father’s side not only was my father a parson but two of my uncles also. Thus I heard many religious conversations, theological discussions, and sermons. Whenever I listened to them I had the feeling: “Yes, yes, that is all very well. But what about the secret? The secret is also the secret of grace. None of you know anything about that. You don’t know that God wants to force me to do wrong, that He forces me to think abominations in order to experience His grace.” Everything the others said was completely beside the point. I thought, “For Heaven’s sake, there must be someone who knows something about it; somewhere there must be the truth.” I rummaged through my father’s library, reading whatever I could on God, the Trinity, spirit, consciousness. I devoured the books, but came away none the wiser. I always found myself thinking, “They don’t know either.” I even searched about in my father’s Luther Bible. Unfortunately, the conventional “edifying” interpretation of Job prevented me from taking a deeper interest in this book. I would have found consolation in it, especially in chapter 9, verses 30—31: “Though I wash myself with snow water … yet shalt thou plunge me in the mire.”

Later my mother told me that in those days I was often depressed. It was not really that; rather, I was brooding on the secret. At such times it was strangely reassuring and calming to sit on my stone. Somehow it would free me of all my doubts. Whenever I thought that I was the stone, the conflict ceased. “The stone has no uncertainties, no urge to communicate, and is eternally the same for thousands of years,” I would think, “while I am only a passing phenomenon which bursts into all kinds of emotions, like a flame that flares up quickly and then goes out.” I was but the sum of my emotions, and the “Other” in me was the timeless, imperishable stone.

At that time, too, there arose in me profound doubts about everything my father said. When I heard him preaching about grace, I always thought of my own experience. What he said sounded stale and hollow, like a tale told by someone who knows it only by hearsay and cannot quite believe it himself. I wanted to help him, but I did not know how. Moreover, I was too shy to tell him of my experience, or to meddle in his personal preoccupations. I felt myself to be on the one hand too little, and on the other hand I was afraid to wield that authority which my “second personality” inspired in me.

Later, when I was eighteen years old, I had many discussions with my father, always with the secret hope of being able to let him know about the miracle of grace, and thereby help to mitigate his pangs of conscience. I was convinced that if he fulfilled the will of God everything would turn out for the best. But our discussions invariably came to an unsatisfactory end. They irritated him, and saddened him. “Oh, nonsense,” he was in the habit of saying, “you always want to think. One ought not to think, but believe.” I would think, “No, one must experience and know,” but I would say, “Give me this belief,” whereupon he would shrug and turn resignedly away.

I began making friendships, mostly with shy boys of simple origins. My marks in school improved. During the following years I even succeeded in reaching the top of the class. However, I observed that below me were schoolmates who envied me and tried at every opportunity to catch up with me. That spoiled my pleasure. I hated all competition, and if someone played a game too competitively I turned my back on the game. Thereafter I remained second in the class, and found this considerably more enjoyable. Schoolwork was a nuisance enough anyway without my wanting to make it harder by competition. A very few teachers, whom I remember with gratitude, showed particular confidence in me. The one I recall with the greatest pleasure was the Latin teacher. He was a university professor and a very clever fellow. As it happened, I had known Latin since I was six, because my father had given me lessons in it. So, instead of making me sit in class, this teacher would often send me to the university library to fetch books for him, and I would joyfully dip into them while prolonging the walk back as much as possible.

Most of the teachers thought me stupid and crafty. Whenever anything went wrong in school I was the first on whom suspicion rested. If there was a row somewhere, I was thought to be the instigator. In reality I was involved in such a brawl only once, and it was then that I discovered that a number of my schoolmates were hostile to me. Seven of them lay in ambush for me and suddenly attacked me. I was big and strong by then — it was when I was fifteen — and inclined to violent rages. I suddenly saw red, seized one of the boys by both arms, swung him around me and with his legs knocked several of the others to the ground. The teachers found out about the affair, but I only dimly remember some sort of punishment which seemed to me unjust. From then on I was let alone. No one dared to attack me again.

To have enemies and be accused unjustly was not what I had expected, but somehow I did not find it incomprehensible. Everything I was reproached for irritated me, but I could not deny these reproaches to myself. I knew so little about myself, and the little was so contradictory that I could not with a good conscience reject any accusations. As a matter of fact I always had a guilty conscience and was aware of both actual and potential faults. For that reason I was particularly sensitive to reproofs, since all of them more or less struck home. Although I had not in reality done what I was accused of, I felt that I might have done it. I would even draw up a list of alibis in case I should be accused of something. I felt positively relieved when I had actually done something wrong. Then at least I knew what my guilty conscience was for.

Naturally I compensated my inner insecurity by an outward show of security, or — to put it better — the defect compensated itself without the intervention of my will. That is, I found myself being guilty and at the same time wishing to be innocent. Somewhere deep in the background I always knew that I was two persons. One was the son of my parents, who went to school and was less intelligent, attentive, hardworking, decent, and clean than many other boys. The other was grown up — old, in fact — sceptical, mistrustful, remote from the world of men, but close to nature, the earth, the sun, the moon, the weather, all living creatures, and above all close to the night, to dreams, and to whatever “God” worked directly in him. I put “God” in quotation marks here. For nature seemed, like myself, to have been set aside by God as non-divine, although created by Him as an expression of Himself. Nothing could persuade me that “in the image of God” applied only to man. In fact it seemed to me that the high mountains, the rivers, lakes, trees, flowers, and animals far better exemplified the essence of God than men with their ridiculous clothes, their meanness, vanity, mendacity, and abhorrent egotism — all qualities with which I was only too familiar from myself, that is, from personality No. 1, the schoolboy of 1890. Besides his world there existed another realm, like a temple in which anyone who entered was transformed and suddenly overpowered by a vision of the whole cosmos, so that he could only marvel and admire, forgetful of himself. Here lived the “Other,” who knew God as a hidden, personal, and at the same time supra-personal secret. Here nothing separated man from God; indeed, it was as though the human mind looked down upon Creation simultaneously with God.

What I am here unfolding, sentence by sentence, is something I was then not conscious of in any particular way, though I sensed it with an overpowering premonition and intensity of feeling. At such times I knew I was worthy of myself, that I was my true self. As soon as I was alone, I could pass over into this state. I therefore sought the peace and solitude of this “Other,” personality No. 2.

The play and counterplay between personalities No. 1 and No. 2, which has run through my whole life, has nothing to do with a “split” or dissociation in the ordinary medical sense. On the contrary, it is played out in every individual. In my life No. 2 has been of prime importance, and I have always tried to make room for anything that wanted to come to me from within. He is a typical figure, but he is perceived only by the very few. Most people’s conscious understanding is not sufficient to realise that he is also what they are.

Church gradually became a place of torment to me. For there men dared to preach aloud — I am tempted to say, shamelessly — about God, about His intentions and actions. There people were exhorted to have those feelings and to believe that secret which I knew to be the deepest, innermost certainty, a certainty not to be betrayed by a single word. I could only conclude that apparently no one knew about this secret, not even the parson, for otherwise no one would have dared to expose the mystery of God in public and to profane those inexpressible feelings with stale sentimentalities. Moreover, I was certain that this was the wrong way to reach God, for I knew, knew from experience, that this grace was accorded only to one who fulfilled the will of God without reservation. This was preached from the pulpit, too, but always on the assumption that revelation had made the will of God plain. To me, on the other hand, it seemed the most obscure and unknown thing of all. To me it seemed that one’s duty was to explore daily the will of God. I did not do that, but I felt sure that I would do it as soon as an urgent reason for so doing presented itself. Personality No. 1 preoccupied me too much of the time. It often seemed to me that religious precepts were being put in place of the will of God — which could be so unexpected and so alarming — for the sole purpose of sparing people the necessity for understanding God’s will. I grew more and more sceptical, and my father’s sermons and those of other parsons became acutely embarrassing to me. All the people about me seemed to take the jargon for granted, and the dense obscurity that emanated from it; thoughtlessly they swallowed all the contradictions, such as that God is omniscient and therefore foresaw all human history, and that he actually created human beings so that they would have to sin, and nevertheless forbids them to sin and even punishes them by eternal damnation in hell-fire.

For a long time the devil had played no part in my thinking, curiously enough. The devil appeared to me no worse than a powerful man’s vicious watchdog, chained up. Nobody had any responsibility for the world except God, and, as I knew only too well, He could be terrible. My doubts and uneasiness increased whenever I heard my father in his emotional sermons speak of the “good” God, praising God’s love for man and exhorting man to love God in return. “Does he really know what he is talking about?” I wondered. “Could he have me, his son, put to the knife as a human sacrifice, like Isaac, or deliver him to an unjust court which would have him crucified like Jesus? No, he could not do that. Therefore in some cases he could not do the will of God, which can be absolutely terrible, as the Bible itself shows.” It became clear to me that when people are exhorted, among other things, to obey God rather than man, this is said just casually and thoughtlessly. Obviously we do not know the will of God at all, for if we did we would treat this central problem with awe, if only out of sheer fear of the overpowering God who can work His terrifying will on helpless human beings, as He had done to me. Could anyone who pretended to know the will of God have foreseen what He had caused me to do? In the New Testament, at any rate, there was nothing comparable. The Old Testament, and especially the Book of Job, might have opened my eyes in this respect, but at that time I was not familiar enough with it. Nor had I heard anything of the sort in the instruction for confirmation, which I was then receiving. The fear of God, which was of course mentioned, was considered antiquated, “Jewish,” and long since superseded by the Christian message of God’s love and goodness.

The symbolism of my childhood experiences and the violence of the imagery upset me terribly. I asked myself: “Who talks like that? Who has the impudence to exhibit a phallus so nakedly, and in a shrine? Who makes me think that God destroys His Church in this abominable manner?” At last I asked myself whether it was not the devil’s doing. For that it must have been God or the devil who spoke and acted in this way was something I never doubted. I felt absolutely sure that it was not myself who had invented these thoughts and images.

These were the crucial experiences of my life. It was then that it dawned on me: I must take the responsibility, it is up to me how my fate turns out. I had been confronted with a problem to which I had to find the answer. And who posed the problem? Nobody ever answered me that. I knew that I had to find the answer out of my deepest self, that I was alone before God, and that God alone asked me these terrible things.

From the beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security, and, though I could never prove it to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have this certainty, it had me. Nobody could rob me of the conviction that it was enjoined upon me to do what God wanted and not what I wanted. That gave me the strength to go my own way. Often I had the feeling that in all decisive matters I was no longer among men, but was alone with God. And when I was “there,” where I was no longer alone, I was outside time; I belonged to the centuries; and He who then gave answer was He who had always been, who had been before my birth. He who always is was there. These talks with the “Other” were my profoundest experiences: on the one hand a bloody struggle, on the other supreme ecstasy.

Naturally, I could not talk with anyone about these things. I knew of no one to whom I might have communicated them except, possibly, my mother. She seemed to think along somewhat similar lines as myself. But I soon noticed that in conversation she was not adequate for me. Her attitude towards me was above all one of admiration, and that was not good for me. And so I remained alone with my thoughts. On the whole, I liked that best, I played alone, daydreamed or strolled in the woods alone, and had a secret world of my own.

My mother was a very good mother to me. She had a hearty animal warmth, cooked wonderfully, and was most companionable and pleasant. She was very stout, and a ready listener. She also liked to talk, and her chatter was like the gay splashing of a fountain. She had a decided literary gift, as well as taste and depth. But this quality never properly emerged; it remained hidden beneath the semblance of a kindly, fat old woman, extremely hospitable, and possessor of a great sense of humour. She held all the conventional opinions a person was obliged to have, but then her unconscious personality would suddenly put in an appearance. That personality was unexpectedly powerful: a sombre, imposing figure possessed of unassailable authority — and no bones about it. I was sure that she consisted of two personalities, one innocuous and human, the other uncanny. This other emerged only now and then, but each time it was unexpected and frightening. She would then speak as if talking to herself, but what she said was aimed at me and usually struck to the core of my being, so that I was stunned into silence.

The first time I remember this happening was when I was about six years old. At that time we had neighbours who were fairly well off. They had three children, the eldest a boy of about my own age, and two younger sisters. They were city folk who, especially on Sundays, dressed their children in a manner that seemed ridiculous to me — patent-leather shoes, white frills, little white gloves. Even on week-days the children were scrubbed and combed. They had fancy manners and anxiously kept their distance from the tough, rude boy with tattered trousers, holes in his shoes, and dirty hands. My mother annoyed me no end with her comparisons and admonishments: “Now look at those nice children, so well brought up and polite, but you behave like a little lout.” Such exhortations humiliated me, and I decided to give the boy a hiding — which I did. His mother was furious, hastened to mine and made a great to-do over my act of violence. My mother was properly horrified and gave me a lecture, spiced with tears, longer and more passionate than anything I had ever heard from her before. I had not been conscious of any fault; on the contrary, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself, for it seemed to me that I had somehow made amends for the incongruous presence of this stranger in our village. Deeply awed by my mother’s excitement, I withdrew penitently to my table behind our old spinet and began playing with my bricks. For some time there was silence in the room. My mother had taken her usual seat by the window, and was knitting. Then I heard her muttering to herself, and from occasional words that I picked up I gathered that she was thinking about the incident, but was now taking another view of it. Suddenly she said aloud, “Of course, one should never have kept a litter like that!” I realised at once that she was talking about those “dressed-up monkeys.” Her favourite brother was a hunter who kept dogs and was always talking about dog breeding, mongrels, purebreds, and litters. To my relief I realised that she too regarded those odious children as inferior whelps, and that her scolding therefore need not be taken at face value. But I also knew, even at that age, that I must keep perfectly still and not come out triumphantly with: “You see, you think as I do!” She would have repudiated the idea indignantly: “You horrid boy, how dare you pretend such a thing about your mother!” I conclude from this that I must already have had earlier experiences of a similar nature which I have forgotten.

I tell this story because at the time of my growing religious scepticism there was another instance which threw light on my mother’s twofold nature. At table one day the talk turned on the dullness of the tunes of certain hymns. A possible revision of the hymnal was mentioned. At that my mother murmured, “O du Liebe meiner Liebe, du verwünschte2 Seligkeit” (O thou love of my love, thou accursed bliss). As in the past I pretended that I had not heard and was careful not to cry out in glee, in spite of my feeling of triumph.

There was an enormous difference between my mother’s two personalities. That was why as a child I often had anxiety dreams about her. By day she was a loving mother, but at night she seemed uncanny. Then she was like one of those seers who is at the same time a strange animal, like a priestess in a bear’s cave. Archaic and ruthless; ruthless as truth and nature. At such moments she was the embodiment of what I have called the “natural mind.”3

I too have this archaic nature, and in me it is linked with the gift — not always pleasant — of seeing people and things as they are. I can let myself be deceived from here to Tipperary when I don’t want to recognise something, and yet at bottom I know quite well how matters really stand. In this I am like a dog — he can be tricked, but he always smells it out in the end. This “insight” is based on instinct, or on a “participation mystique” with others. It is as if the “eyes of the background” do the seeing in an impersonal act of perception.

This was something I did not realise until much later, when some very strange things happened to me. For instance, there was the time when I recounted the life story of a man without knowing him. It was at the wedding of a friend of my wife’s; the bride and her family were all entirely unknown to me. During the meal I was sitting opposite a middle-aged gentleman with a long, handsome beard, who had been introduced to me as a barrister. We were having an animated conversation about criminal psychology. In order to answer a particular question of his, I made up a story to illustrate it, embellishing it with all sorts of details. While I was telling my story, I noticed that a quite different expression came over the man’s face, and a silence fell on the table. Very much abashed, I stopped speaking. Thank heavens we were already at the dessert, so I soon stood up and went into the lounge of the hotel. There I withdrew into a corner, lit a cigar, and tried to think over the situation. At this moment one of the other guests who had been sitting at my table came over and asked reproachfully, “How did you ever come to commit such a frightful indiscretion?” “Indiscretion?” “Why yes, that story you told.” “But I made it all up!”

To my amazement and horror it turned out that I had told the story of the man opposite me, exactly and in all its details. I also discovered, at this moment, that I could no longer remember a single word of the story — even to this day I have been unable to recall it. In his Selbstschau Zschokke4 describes a similar incident: how once, in an inn, he was able to unmask an unknown young man as a thief, because he had seen the theft being committed before his inner eye.