Part 4

My loud shrieks and imprecations had awakened the whole steamer. They were attributed to a nightmare. I did not seek to take anyone into my confidence; but, from that day forward, my life became a long series of mental tortures, I could hardly shut my eyes without becoming witness of some horrible deed, some scene of misery, death or crime, whether past, present or even future—as I ascertained later on. It was as though some mocking fiend had taken upon himself the task of making me go through the vision of everything that was bestial, malignant and hopeless, in this world of misery. No radiant vision of beauty or virtue ever lit with the faintest ray these pictures of awe and wretchedness that I seemed doomed to witness. Scenes of wickedness, of murder, of treachery and of lust fell dismally upon my sight, and I was brought face to face with the vilest results of man’s passions, the most terrible outcome of his material earthly cravings.

Had the Bonze foreseen, indeed, the dreary results, when he spoke of Daij-Dzins to whom I left “an ingress” “a door open” in me? Nonsense! There must be some physiological, abnormal change in me. Once at Nuremberg, when I have ascertained how false was the direction taken by my fears—I dared not hope for no misfortune at all—these meaningless visions will disappear as they came. The very fact that my fancy follows but one direction, that of pictures of misery, of human passions in their worst, material shape, is a proof to me, of their unreality.

“If, as you say, man consists of one substance, matter, the object of the physical senses; and if perception with its modes is only the result of the organization of the brain, then should we be naturally attracted but to the material, the earthly”.... I thought I heard the familiar voice of the Bonze interrupting my reflections, and repeating an often used argument of his in his discussions with me.

“There are two planes of visions before men,” I again heard him say, “the plane of undying love and spiritual aspirations, the efflux from the eternal light; and the plane of restless, ever changing matter, the light in which the misguided Daij-Dzins bathe.”

VII

ETERNITY IN A SHORT DREAM

In those days I could hardly bring myself to realize, even for a moment, the absurdity of a belief in any kind of spirits, whether good or bad. I now understood, if I did not believe, what was meant by the term, though I still persisted in hoping that it would finally prove some physical derangement or nervous hallucination. To fortify my unbelief the more, I tried to bring back to my memory all the arguments used against a faith in such superstitions, that I had ever read or heard. I recalled the biting sarcasms of Voltaire, the calm reasoning of Hume, and I repeated to myself _ad nauseam_ the words of Rousseau, who said that superstition, “the disturber of Society,” could never be too strongly attacked. “Why should the sight, the phantasmagoria, rather”—I argued—“of that which we know in a waking sense to be false, come to affect us at all?” Why should—

Names, whose sense we see not Fray us with things that be not?

One day the old captain was narrating to us the various superstitions to which sailors were addicted; a pompous English missionary remarked that Fielding had declared long ago that “superstition renders a man a fool,”—after which he hesitated for an instant, and abruptly stopped. I had not taken any part in the general conversation; but no sooner had the reverend speaker relieved himself of the quotation, than I saw in that halo of vibrating light, which I now noticed almost constantly over every human head on the steamer, the words of Fielding’s next proposition—“and _scepticism makes him mad_.”

I had heard and read of the claims of those who pretend to seership, that they often see the thoughts of people traced in the aura of those present. Whatever “aura” may mean with others, I had now a personal experience of the truth of the claim, and felt sufficiently disgusted with the discovery! I—a _clairvoyant_! a new horror added to my life, an absurd and ridiculous gift developed, which I shall have to conceal from all, feeling ashamed of it as if it were a case of leprosy. At this moment my hatred to the Yamabooshi, and even to my venerable old friend, the Bonze, knew no bounds. The former had evidently by his manipulations over me while I was lying unconscious, touched some unknown physiological spring in my brain, and by loosing it had called forth a faculty generally hidden in the human constitution; and it was the Japanese priest who had introduced the wretch into my house!

But my anger and my curses were alike useless, and could be of no avail. Moreover, we were already in European waters, and in a few more days we should be at Hamburg. Then would my doubts and fears be set at rest, and I should find, to my intense relief, that although clairvoyance, as regards the reading of human thoughts on the spot, may have some truth in it, the discernment of such events at a distance, as I had _dreamed of_, was an impossibility for human faculties. Notwithstanding all my reasoning, however, my heart was sick with fear, and full of the blackest presentiments; I _felt_ that my doom was closing. I suffered terribly, my nervous and mental prostration becoming intensified day by day.

The night before we entered port I had a dream.

I fancied I was dead. My body lay cold and stiff in its last sleep, whilst its dying consciousness, which still regarded itself as “I,” realizing the event, was preparing to meet in a few seconds its own extinction. It had been always my belief that as the brain preserved heat longer than any of the other organs, and was the last to cease its activity, the thought in it survived bodily death by several minutes. Therefore, I was not in the least surprised to find in my dream that while the frame had already crossed that awful gulf “no mortal e’er repassed,” its consciousness was still in the gray twilight, the first shadows of the great Mystery. Thus my THOUGHT wrapped, as I believed, in the remnants, of its now fast retiring vitality, was watching with intense and eager curiosity the approaches of its own dissolution, _i.e._, of its _annihilation_. “I” was hastening to record my last impressions, lest the dark mantle of eternal oblivion should envelope me, before I had time to feel and _enjoy_, the great, the supreme triumph of learning that my life-long convictions were true, that death is a complete and absolute cessation of conscious being. Everything around me was getting darker with every moment. Huge gray shadows were moving before my vision, slowly at first, then with accelerated motion, until they commenced whirling around with an almost vertiginous rapidity. Then, as though that motion had taken place only for purposes of brewing darkness, the object once reached, it slackened its speed, and as the darkness became gradually transformed into intense blackness, it ceased altogether. There was nothing now within my immediate perceptions, but that fathomless black Space, as dark as pitch: to me it appeared as limitless and as silent as the shoreless Ocean of Eternity upon which Time, the progeny of man’s brain, is for ever gliding, but which it can never cross.

Dream is defined by Cato as “but the image of our hopes and fears.” Having never feared death when awake, I felt, in this dream of mine, calm and serene at the idea of my speedy end. In truth, I felt rather relieved at the thought—probably owing to my recent mental suffering—that the end of all, of doubt, of fear for those I loved, of suffering, and of every anxiety, was close at hand. The constant anguish that had been gnawing ceaselessly at my heavy, aching heart for many a long and weary month, had now become unbearable; and if as Seneca thinks, death is but “the ceasing to be what we were before,” it was better that I should die. The body is dead; “I,” its consciousness—that which is all that remains of me now, for a few moments longer—am preparing to follow. Mental perceptions will get weaker, more dim and hazy with every second of time, until the longed for oblivion envelopes me completely in its cold shroud. Sweet is the magic hand of Death, the great World-Comforter; profound and dreamless is sleep in its unyielding arms. Yea, verily, it is a welcome guest.... A calm and peaceful haven amidst the roaring billows of the Ocean of life, whose breakers lash in vain the rock-bound shores of Death. Happy the lonely bark that drifts into the still waters of its black gulf, after having been so long, so cruelly tossed about by the angry waves of sentient life. Moored in it for evermore, needing no longer either sail or rudder, my bark will now find rest. Welcome then, O Death, at this tempting price; and fare thee well, poor body, which, having neither sought it nor derived pleasure from it, I now readily give up!...

While uttering this death-chant to the prostrate form before me, I bent over, and examined it with curiosity. I felt the surrounding darkness oppressing me, weighing on me almost tangibly, and I fancied I found in it the approach of the Liberator I was welcoming. And yet ... how very strange! If real, final Death takes place in our consciousness; if after the bodily death, “I” and my conscious perceptions are one—how is it that these perceptions do not become weaker, why does my _brain_-action seem as vigorous as ever now ... that I am _de facto_ dead?... Nor does the usual feeling of anxiety, the “heavy heart” so-called, decrease in intensity; nay, it even seems to become worse ... unspeakably so!... How long it takes for full oblivion to arrive!... Ah, here’s my body again!... Vanished out of sight for a second or two, it reappears before me once more.... How white and ghastly it looks! Yet ... its brain cannot be quite dead, since “I,” its consciousness, am still acting, since we two fancy that we still are, that we live and think, disconnected from our creator and its ideating cell.

Suddenly I felt a strong desire to see how much longer the progress of dissolution was likely to last, before it placed its last seal on the brain and rendered it inactive. I examined my brain in its cranial cavity, through the (to me) entirely transparent walls and roof of the skull, and even _touched the brain-matter_.... How, or with _whose hands_, I am now unable to say; but the impression of the slimy, intensely cold matter produced a very strong impression on me, in that dream. To my great dismay, I found that the blood having entirely congealed and the brain-tissues having themselves undergone a change that would no longer permit any molecular action, it became impossible for me to account for the phenomena now taking place with myself. Here was I,—or my consciousness, which is all one—standing apparently entirely disconnected from my brain which could no longer function.... But I had no time left for reflection. A new and most extraordinary change in my perceptions had taken place and now engrossed my whole attention.... What _does_ this signify?...

The same darkness was around me as before, a black, impenetrable space, extending in every direction. Only now, right before me, in whatever direction I was looking, moving with me which way soever I moved, there was a gigantic round clock; a disk, whose large white face shone ominously on the ebony-black background. As I looked at its huge dial, and at the pendulum moving to and fro regularly and slowly in Space, as if its swinging meant to divide eternity, I saw its needles pointing to _seven minutes past five_. “The hour at which my torture had commenced at Kioto!” I had barely found time to think of the coincidence, when, to my unutterable horror, I felt myself going through the same, the identical, process that I had been made to experience on that memorable and fatal day. I swam underground, dashing swiftly through the earth; I found myself once more in the pauper’s grave and recognized my brother-in-law in the mangled remains; I witnessed his terrible death; entered my sister’s house; followed her agony, and saw her go mad. I went over the same scenes without missing a single detail of them. But, alas! I was no longer iron-bound in the calm indifference that had then been mine, and which in that first vision had left me as unfeeling to my great misfortune as if I had been a heartless thing of rock. My mental tortures were now becoming beyond description and well-nigh unbearable. Even the settled despair, the never ceasing anxiety I was constantly experiencing when awake, had become now, in my dream and in the face of this repetition of visions and events, as an hour of darkened sunlight compared to a deadly cyclone. Oh! how I suffered in this wealth and pomp of infernal horrors, to which the conviction of the survival of man’s consciousness after death—for in that dream I firmly believed that my body was dead—added the most terrifying of all!

The relative relief I felt, when, after going over the last scene, I saw once more the great white face of the dial before me was not of long duration. The long, arrow-shaped needle was pointing on the colossal disk at—_seven minutes and a-half past five_ o’clock. But, before I had time to well realize the change, the needle moved slowly backwards, stopped at precisely the seventh minute, and—O cursed fate!... I found myself driven into a repetition of the same series over again! Once more I swam underground, and saw, and heard, and suffered every torture that hell can provide; I passed through every mental anguish known to man or fiend. I returned to see the fatal dial and its needle—after what appeared to me an eternity—moved, as before, only half a minute forward. I beheld it, with renewed terror, moving back again, and felt myself propelled forward anew. And so it went on, and on, and on, time after time, in what seemed to me an endless succession, a series which never had any beginning, nor would it ever have an end....

Worst of all; my consciousness, my “I,” had apparently acquired the phenomenal capacity of trebling, quadrupling, and even of decuplating itself. I lived, felt and suffered, in the same space of time, in half-a-dozen different places at once, passing over various events of my life, at different epochs, and under the most dissimilar circumstances; though predominant over all was my _spiritual_ experience at Kioto. Thus, as in the famous _fugue_ in _Don Giovanni_, the heart-rending notes of Elvira’s _aria_ of despair ring high above, but interfere in no way with the melody of the minuet, the song of seduction, and the chorus, so I went over and over my travailed woes, the feelings of agony unspeakable at the awful sights of my vision, the repetition of which blunted in no wise even a single pang of my despair and horror; nor did these feelings weaken in the least scenes and events entirely disconnected with the first one, that I was living through again, or interfere in any way the one with the other. It was a maddening experience! A series of contrapuntal, mental phantasmagoria from real life. Here was I, during the same half-a-minute of time, examining with cold curiosity the mangled remains of my sister’s husband; following with the same indifference the effects of the news on her brain, as in my first Kioto vision, and feeling _at the same time_ hell-torture for these very events, as when I returned to consciousness. I was listening to the philosophical discourses of the Bonze, every word of which I heard and understood, and was trying to laugh him to scorn. I was again a child, then a youth, hearing my mother’s and my sweet sister’s voices, admonishing me and teaching duty to all men. I was saving a friend from drowning, and was sneering at his aged father who thanks me for having saved a “soul” yet unprepared to meet his Maker.

“Speak of _dual_ consciousness, you psycho-physiologists!”—I cried, in one of the moments when agony, mental and as it seemed to me physical also, had arrived at a degree of intensity which would have killed a dozen living men; “speak of your psychological and physiological experiments, you schoolmen, puffed up with pride and book-learning! Here am I to give you the lie....” And now I was reading the works and holding converse with learned professors and lecturers, who had led me to my fatal scepticism. And, while arguing the impossibility of consciousness divorced from its brain, I was shedding tears of blood over the supposed fate of my nieces and nephews. More terrible than all: I knew, _as only a liberated consciousness can know_, that all I had seen in my vision at Japan, and all that I was seeing and hearing over and over again now, was true in every point and detail, that it was a long string of ghastly and terrible, still of real, actual, facts.

For, perhaps, the hundredth time, I had rivetted my attention on the needle of the clock, I had lost the number of my gyrations and was fast coming to the conclusion that they would never stop, that consciousness, is, after all, indestructible, and that this was to be my punishment in Eternity. I was beginning to realize from personal experience how the condemned sinners would feel—“were not eternal damnation a logical and mathematical impossibility in an ever progressing Universe”—I still found the force to argue. Yea, indeed; at this hour of my ever-increasing agony, my consciousness—now my synonym for “I”—had still the power of revolting at certain theological claims, of denying all their propositions, all—save ITSELF.... No; I denied the independent nature of my consciousness no longer, for I knew it now to be such. But is it _eternal_ withal? O thou incomprehensible and terrible Reality! But if thou art eternal, who then art thou?—since there is no deity, no God. Whence dost thou come, and when didst thou first appear, if thou art not a part of the cold body lying yonder? And whither dost thou lead me, who am thyself, and shall our thought and fancy have an end? What is thy real name, thou unfathomable REALITY, and impenetrable MYSTERY! Oh, I would fain annihilate thee.... “Soul-Vision”!--who speaks of Soul, and whose voice is this?... It says that I see now for myself, that there is a Soul in man, after all.... I deny this. My Soul, my vital Soul, or the Spirit of life, has expired with my body, with the gray matter of my brain. This “I” of mine, this consciousness, is not yet proven to me as eternal. Reincarnation, in which the Bonze felt so anxious I should believe may be true.... Why not? Is not the flower born year after year from the same root? Hence this “I” once separated from its brain, losing its balance, and calling forth such a host of visions ... before reincarnating....

I was again face to face with the inexorable, fatal clock. And as I was watching its needle, I heard the voice of the Bonze, coming out of the depths of its white face, saying: “In this case, I fear, _you would only have to open and to shut the temple door, over and over again, during a period which, however short, would seem to you an eternity_.”...

The clock had vanished, darkness made room for light, the voice of my old friend was drowned by a multitude of voices overhead on deck; and I awoke in my berth, covered with a cold perspiration, and faint with terror.

VIII

A TALE OF WOE

We were at Hamburg, and no sooner had I seen my partners, who could hardly recognize me, than with their consent and good wishes I started for Nuremberg.

Half-an-hour after my arrival, the last doubt with regard to the correctness of my vision had disappeared. The reality was worse than any expectations could have made it, and I was henceforward doomed to the most desolate life. I ascertained that I had seen the terrible tragedy with all its heartrending details. My brother-in-law, killed under the wheels of a machine; my sister, insane, and now rapidly sinking towards her end; my niece—the sweet flower of nature’s fairest work—dishonored, in a den of infamy; the little children dead of a contagious disease in an orphanage; my last surviving nephew at sea, no one knew where. A whole house, a home of love and peace, scattered; and I, left alone, a witness of this world of death, of desolation and dishonor. The news filled me with infinite despair, and I sank helpless before this wholesale, dire disaster, which rose before me all at once. The shock proved too much, and I fainted. The last thing I heard before entirely losing my consciousness was a remark of the Burgmeister: “Had you, before leaving Kioto, telegraphed to the city authorities of your whereabouts, and of your intention of coming home to take charge of your young relatives, we might have placed them elsewhere, and thus have saved them from their fate. No one knew that the children had a well-to-do relative. They were left paupers and had to be dealt with as such. They were comparatively strangers in Nuremberg, and under the unfortunate circumstances you could hardly have expected anything else.... I can only express my sincere sorrow.”

It was this terrible knowledge that I might, at any rate, have saved my young niece from her unmerited fate, but that through my neglect I had not done so, that was killing me. Had I but followed the friendly advice of the Bonze, Tamoora, and telegraphed to the authorities some weeks previous to my return much might have been avoided. It was all this, coupled with the fact that I could no longer doubt clairvoyance and clairaudience—the possibility of which I had so long denied—that brought me so heavily down upon my knees. I could avoid the censure of my fellow-creatures, but I could never escape the stings of my conscience, the reproaches of my own aching heart—no, not as long as I lived. I cursed my stubborn scepticism, my denial of facts, my early education, I cursed myself, and the whole world....

For several days I contrived not to sink beneath my load, for I had a duty to perform to the dead and to the living. But my sister once rescued from the pauper’s asylum, placed under the care of the best physicians, with her daughter to attend to her last moments, and the Jewess, whom I had brought to confess her crime, safely lodged in jail—my fortitude and strength suddenly abandoned me. Hardly a week after my arrival I was myself no better than a raving maniac, helpless in the strong grip of a brain fever. For several weeks I lay between life and death, the terrible disease defying the skill of the best physicians. At last my strong constitution prevailed, and—to my life-long sorrow—they proclaimed me saved.

I heard the news with a bleeding heart. Doomed to drag the loathsome burden of life henceforth alone, and in constant remorse; hoping for no help or remedy on earth, and still refusing to believe in the possibility of anything better than a short survival of consciousness beyond the grave, this unexpected return to life added only one more drop of gall to my bitter feelings. They were hardly soothed by the immediate return, during the first days of my convalescence, of those unwelcome and unsought for visions, whose correctness and reality I could deny no more. Alas the day! they were no longer in my sceptical, blind mind—

The children of an idle brain Begot of nothing but vain fantasy;