‘What’s the matter?’ I ask him.
‘I’m just trying to think what kind of sense it makes for me to have been coming here to see you every evening. What did you want of me, you beautiful queen with no heart? What use have I had out of all the things you’ve told me if they’ve only served to make me unhappy? You’ve talked on and on about my having to find myself, but with every one of your words and deeds you’ve helped to make me lose myself completely. I was a brave, courageous fighter, afraid of no one, and now I’ve become a slave. The slave of a tiny woman who hardly comes up to my shoulders! And now I’m afraid of the future. How am I going to be able to live without you?’
A hot wave of joy floods through my being. I try to imagine it’s only my vanity. But I feel a shock! In the beginning I really did want him to recognize my feminine beauty and power, and as soon as I had achieved that I wanted to use my power over him to help him on the inner path. I took all kinds of pains to awaken the self within him. But instead, he’s fallen in love with me. I didn’t want to go that far! I don’t want earthly love. I’ve wanted to create with him a far higher unity, the unity of the self. I wanted to lead him to God! But it’s done no good at all for me to bring forth the deepest truths from out of my inner being … He sees me only as a woman. He cannot or will not rise above the sensual. He doesn’t see me. He doesn’t realize that he does not love me. I don’t really exist for him. He merely loves my body, the outer cloak which is merely a manifestation of my true self! How horrible! How debasing!
‘Look,’ I say, trembling, ‘it hasn’t made any sense at all for you to come here to see me, because we just don’t understand each other. We just can’t get together. I want to help you rise to the spiritual plane, and you want to drag me down to the level of the body. It hasn’t made any sense at all to go through all this trouble. Go back to your homeland in peace, and we’ll never meet again!’
At these words, the blood rushes to his head. His face, his neck … the whole man becomes dark red, so dark his hair seems lighter than his skin. His eyes flash like glowing embers, and with a shock I see his whole spiritual body turning into a powerful flame. Then, without my having time to defend myself, he seizes my arm, holding it as if in iron tongs, pulls me to his mighty breast, embraces me, pushes my head backward, presses his mouth to my lips with such force that I lose my breath. Then he kisses my face, my neck and my lips again, and in between his burning kisses, he whispers hoarsely: ‘So you don’t want to see me any more? But I want to see you, and we’ll meet again … we’ll meet again.’
As I saw his wild face coming close, I felt a wave of deathly panic. I wanted to push him back and get away, but as he locked me in his mighty arms and pressed his burning hot mouth upon my lips, all my inner being caught his fire. I lost control over myself, and without resistance I gave in to the overpowering feeling of pleasure and delight that sprang up out of my fright and swept through me. Now I realize I love him … have loved him from the first moment … with all my body and soul … with my whole being I love him passionately and I always will! The fire overwhelms me as if coming forth from a gigantic volcano. Hot flames sweep through me … devour me … my backbone feels like a bridge of glowing embers, holding seven burning torches. But now I’m no longer in the immovable axis of my spinal column, no longer in the midpoint from which my true self radiates the fire of life. On the contrary, my consciousness has fallen into my burning body, and sparkling, crackling, flashes of lightning race through my veins … through my whole being. All my nerves are aglow, all my thoughts blotted out. They’re burning out my consciousness … annihilating me … Then I black out and everything disappears …
Little by little I come to again … slowly I open my eyes … see stone walls around me. I am lying on the floor of my little cell. I am alone … surrounded by the silence of a tomb. I have no thoughts. I haven’t anything I could think about any more …
[…]
Slowly I go back through the long temple passage, past my own little cell. Without thinking, I go in and sit down on the stone bench. I sink back into memories … the room expands, from every side I hear the echo of infinity, and within me pictures emerge: a figure, wrapped in hazy fog, approaches ine … I recognize it: the hazy figure I saw in my vision when I was being initiated. It comes quite close to me; then a flame spurts out of it, the whole figure begins to burn and becomes a fiery being who irresistibly embraces me, encircles me and penetrates me so that I too catch fire and begin to burn. Then I hear his voice whispering to me: ‘I told you we would meet again. You belong to me, you will never again be free of me, we will meet again … in endless time and in timeless infinity we will meet again, again …’ And the echo of his voice goes on repeating thousands and thousands of times: ‘meet again … meet again … meet again …’
‘No!’ I cry, ‘I will not, I hate you!’
The figure of fire laughs: ‘As long as you hate me, you love me and I have power over you! You can’t get free as easy as that … we will meet again,’ the echo goes on calling … As I hear this voice echoing back thousands of times from every direction in the empty room, so powerfully that the air itself literally vibrates with it, I know the hazy figure of fire is whispering and looking at me with voice and eyes I can no longer resist. In all the endless lives I was able to remember in the vision I had during my initiation, I was always seeking the same voice and the same eyes in all the voices that spoke to me and in all the eyes that looked at me and in all the countless men I met in all those countless lives. In all these men I was seeking the man whom I love with love eternal and with every drop of my blood, the only man, ‘my’ man: the image and likeness of my complementary half …
[…]
Monstrous horror, despair and fear seize me, holding me as in a vice, and out of this fear there suddenly appears again the monster that is the expression of the law of matter. I see his deathly, satiric ugly face grinning at me, his trenchant glance boring deep down into me and tying me to the mummy that once was I.
Then the monster speaks to me: ‘So now you are in my power! You see, the highest and the lowest are always reflections of each other. Perfection resting within itself and eternal rigidity are two sides of the same divinity. You wanted to become conscious in the perfection resting within itself, and now you have fallen into rigidity! ‘Yes, the mortal remains of the initiates are embalmed by the priests in the temple so that the divine power radiated by their bodies can continue to be active, like a battery, for a long time. Their spirit is free; in their consciousness they aren’t attached to the earth. But you have bound yourself to your body. By carnal love, you guided the divine power within you into your lower nerve centres and burned yourself up. In this way, your consciousness together with your spiritual body are bound to your material body: you are my prisoner forever! Whereas the spiritual body of the initiate, through the act of embalming, is attached to his mummy, his consciousness is in eternity. But you are exiled in infinity! ‘Eternity is the eternal present; infinity is the eternal future which can never be reached and never becomes present. ‘Eternity never had a beginning and thus will never have an end. Eternity is timeless present which has no past nor future. Infinity, however, means a falling out of eternity into the future, without a present! ‘You wanted to take part in the spiritualization of the earth. Now, spiritualize this little lump of earth that was your body if you can! Ha, ha, ha! The priestess is lying here, and her consciousness isn’t more than a piece of stone! ‘Now you’re undergoing the first test of the initiation: in the condition of consciousness of matter with a human consciousness! Just try to get free if you can! You’re my prisoner! You can’t get away from me because you have become I. In your initiation you conquered me because I had to recognize in the face of your divinely spiritual consciousness that I would not exist without the self. Thus I had to admit that I am you. But now it’s the other way round: You in your consciousness have become matter. You have identified yourself with your body and are nevertheless spirit like I am, namely, the spirit of matter. Therefore, you have become I! ‘You’re my prisoner in infinity … in darkness … imprisoned in this corpse which you were and which because of the embalming can’t decay to allow you to go free. It will be your punishment to watch how this mummy—that now preserves your beauty because of the embalming process—will gradually shrink and become the image and likeness of me. You wanted to be immortal in the spirit of eternity, and you have become imperishable in this mummy into all infinity, into infinity, … infinity …’
I am powerless. I must listen. I lie there with my spiritual body indissolubly bound to my mummy. In desperation, I attempt to escape into unconsciousness, but I cannot! I must lie there completely conscious, without having the vaguest idea about time as it flows on past me. Time! What are you, oh time! You exist only to the extent that we human beings are unhappy! In happiness there is no time: our consciousness stands still; the concept of time disappears. Only when happiness is over do we suddenly realize that while our consciousness was hovering tunelessly in the eternal present, time was rushing onward. Time begins with our fall from happiness, from paradise. But unhappiness too knows no time, for the more unhappy we feel, the slower time goes by; minutes seem hours, and in our moments of deepest despair, when sufferings and torture are unbearable, every moment becomes an infinity; time freezes! Oh, how right Satan is! The highest and the lowest are as alike as two twins, just like reality and its reflection, appearance. Happiness is timeless eternity, and the opposite, unhappiness, is endless time—infinity.
I lie there and have nothing, absolutely nothing, with which to compare or measure time! Oh, tree of knowledge of good and evil! Now I understand your truth that recognition is only possible when we can compare! How can I know how much time has passed when I can’t see the sun, this divine timepiece … when I have no idea what kind of an experience of time a day represents in this darkness? What is there to show me time when nothing happens, when only solidified darkness reigns around me? How can I know anything about time when I no longer have a heart which once measured the rhythm of life in my breast and now with its pulse could give me an idea of time? Have I been lying here for a few minutes and does it already seem an eternity? Or weeks … years … or centuries … millennia? What is a minute and what is a millennium? How could I possibly know the difference?
The feeling of horror and fear refuses to leave me for a single moment. I no longer have lungs with which to draw a deep breath, with which to draw fresh power from the eternal source … with which to measure time by their breathing. I cannot look in any direction for help for my tortured soul … The tortures and sufferings know no end … no end … no end …
Time ran across the face of the great cosmic clock, along the circumference of the gigantic wheel of creation … ever onward even though I had not the faintest idea it was passing … It seemed to me I had been lying there for aeons and aeons, stiff and rigid … as if the tortures of hell would never end … when finally a moment did come in which I felt a force approaching me … a force greater and stronger than the bond which held my consciousness to my mummy, and which, now completely dried and shrivelled, had become the horrible image of the spirit of matter. This new force was drawing me irresistibly in some direction. After all the sufferings and tortures of hell I lost consciousness.
Two people, related to me in their souls, united and gave me the opportunity to inherit a body corresponding to the nature and degree of my far-fallen consciousness. Because I had fallen as a woman, I had to be born again and again as a woman until I re-attained the level from which I had fallen. I came into surroundings where I met only semi-conscious people … where my deeds and those of the people around me were ruled by passions and animal instincts … where I found only brutality, crude selfishness and an absence of any kind of love.
I lived several insignificant lives one after the other, all in a hazy, semianimal state of consciousness, and all of them serving only to awaken my emotional life. Misery and incessant work woke and polished my dulled and feelingless nerves. Men always played a great role. Men from whose bodies the same passionate fire of physical instincts always came forth to burn me.
Again and again I met the fiery eyes and the whispering voice of the spirit woven of fire whom I had first met in my third trial. And again and again I was forced to dance with the spirit in the cavern of sensuality and passions where people turned the sacrament of procreation into a self-seeking end in itself … and I had to dance on with this spirit until I could scarcely stand on my weary feet. I wanted to be ‘happy’ and I kept on seeking love … kept on seeking the one and only man whom I could have loved and who could have loved me, the image of my complementary half. But I found only whipped-up sensuality and heartless passions that never could have satisfied me. I went on and on, seeking happiness again and again in the arms of men, trying to find the one I loved … the one with whom I could experience true love …