"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,
hard-working, decent, and clean than many other boys. The other
was grown up-old, in fact-skeptical, mistrustful, remote from the
world of men, but close to nature, the earth, the sun, the moon, the
weather, a 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 suprapersonal 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 articulate 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....
...Although at that time I doubtless saw no difference as yet
between personalities No. 1 and No. 2, and still claimed the world
of No. 2 as my own personal world, there was always, deep in the
background, the feeling that something other than myself was
involved. It was as though a breath of the great world of stars and
endless space had touched me, or as if a spirit had invisibly
entered the room-the spirit of one who had long been dead and yet
was perpetually present in timelessness until far into the future.
Denouements of this sort were wreathed with the halo of a numen.
At that time, of course, I could never have expressed myself in this
fashion, nor am I now attributing to my state of consciousness
something that was not there at the time. I am only trying to express
the feelings I had then, and to shed light on that twilight world with
the help of what I know now...
...It was some months after the incident just described that my
schoolmates hung the nickname "Father Abraham" on me. No. 1
could not understand why, and thought it silly and ridiculous. Yet
somewhere in the background I felt that the name had hit the mark.
All allusions to this background were painful to me, for the more I
read and the more familiar I became with city life, the stronger grew
my impression that what I was now getting to know as reality
belonged to an order of things different from the view of the world I
had grown up with in the country, among rivers and woods, among
men and animals in a small village bathed in sunlight, with the winds
and the clouds moving over it, and encompassed by dark night in
which uncertain things happened. It was no mere locality on the
map, but "God's world," so ordered by Him and filled with secret
meaning. But apparently men did not know this, and even the
animals had somehow lost the senses to perceive it. That was
evident, for example, in the sorrowful, lost look of the cows, and in
the resigned eyes of horses, in the devotion of dogs, who clung so
desperately to human beings, and even in the self-assured step of
the cats who had chosen house and barn as their residence and
hunting ground. People were like the animals, and seemed as
unconscious as they. They looked down upon the ground or up into
the trees in order to see what could be put to use, and for what
purpose; like annuals they herded, paired, and fought, but did not
see that they dwelt in a unified cosmos, in God's world, in an
eternity where everything is already born and everything has already
died....
...At that time it would, as I have said, have been beyond my powers
to formulate my feelings and intuition in any graphic way, for they all
occurred in No. 2 personality, while my active and comprehending
ego remained passive and was absorbed into the sphere of the
"old man," who belonged to the centuries. I experienced him and
his influence in a curiously unreflective manner; when he was
present, No. 1 personality paled to the point of nonexistence, and
when the ego that became increasingly identical with No. 1
personality dominated the scene, the old man, if remembered at all,
seemed a remote and unreal dream...
...Between my sixteenth and nineteenth years the fog of my dilemma
slowly lifted, and my depressive states of mind improved. No. 1
personality emerged more and more distinctly. School and city life
took up my time, and my increased knowledge gradually
permeated or repressed the world of intuitive premonitions. I began
systematically pursuing questions I had consciously framed...
...In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism. Science met, to a very large extent, the needs of No. 1 personality, whereas the humane or
historical studies provided beneficial instruction for No. 2.
Torn between these two poles, I was for a long time unable to settle
on anything...
... Now I knew that No. 1
was the bearer of the light, and that No. 2 followed him like a
shadow. My task was to shield the light and not look back at the vita
peracta; this was evidently a forbidden realm of light of a different
sort. I must go forward against the storm, which sought to thrust me
back into the immeasurable darkness of a world where one is
aware of nothing except the surfaces of things in the background. In
the role of No. 1, I had to go forward-into study, moneymaking,
responsibilities, entanglements, confusions, errors, submissions,
defeats....
...My view of the world spun around another ninety degrees; I
recognized clearly that my path led irrevocably outward, into the
limitations and darkness of three-dimensionality. It seemed to me
that Adam must once have left Paradise in this manner; Eden had
become a specter for him, and light was where a stony field had to
be tilled in the sweat of his brow...."
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