The Green Face (26 page)

Only when you have purged your body of all trace of the
corpse can you say, `Now sleep has left me for all time’.

Then will the miracle be complete that men cannot believe,
because they are deceived by theirsenses and cannot understand
that matter and force are the same; the miracle is that, even if you
are buried, there will be no corpse in the coffin.

Only then, and not before, will you be able to distinguish what
is of the essence from mere appearances; anyone you meet then
can only be one who has taken the path before you. All others
will be shadows.

Until then at every step it will be uncertain whether you are
to become the happiest orthe unhappiest of beings. But fearnot,
none who have trodden the path of wakefulness have ever been
abandoned by the guides, even if they have gone astray.

There is a sign I will give you by which you shall know
whether a vision you have is of the essence or a delusion: if it
should appear to you and your mind is clouded, and the things
of the physical world seem unclear or invisible, then trust it not.
Be on your guard. It is part of you. If you cannot understand the
metaphor concealed within it, then it is only a ghost and without
substance, a spectre, a thief that sucks out your life from you.
The thieves that steal the strength from your soul are worse than
earthly thieves. Like will-o’-the-wisps, they tempt you into the
marshes of false hope, to leave you behind in the darkness and
disappear for ever.

Do not let yourself be blinded, not by any miracle that they
appear to perform for you, nor by any sacred name they adopt,
nor by any prophecy they pronounce, not even if it should be
fulfilled: they are yourmortal enemies, spewed out from the hell
of your body, and you are wrestling with them for mastery.
Know, now, that the miraculous powers they possess are your
own, which they have wrested from you in order to keep you
enslaved. They can only live by preying on your life, but if you
can conquer them, they will be reduced once more to mute,
obedient tools, which you can use at your will.

Countless are the victims which they have claimed among
mankind; look at the history of visionaries and sects, and you will see that the path of self-control that you are following is
strewn with skulls.

Unaware of what it was doing, mankind built a wall to keep
these visions out: materialism. This wall is an impregnable
defence; it is built in the image of the body, but it is also a prison
wall that blocks the view outside.

Today, as this wall is slowly crumbling, allowing our inner
life to rise on new wings like a phoenix from the ashes, in which
for centuries it lay as if dead, the vultures of another world are
also stretching their wings. So beware. Only the balance in
which you weigh yourmind cantell you whetherthe visions you
see are ones you can trust; the more awake it is, the more the
scales are being tipped in your favour.

If a guide, a helper or a brother from a spiritual world wishes
to appear to you, then he must be able to do so without battening
upon your mind, as do the others. Like Doubting Thomas, you
can thrust your hand into his side.

It would be easy to avoid the visions and their dangers, all you
need to do is to be like an ordinary man. But what is the advantage of that? You will remain captive in the prison of your body
until Death, the executioner, drags you to the block.

The longing of mortal men to see the celestial beings in visible form is a cry that also wakes the spectres of the underworld,
because such longing is not pure, it is greed, not longing,
because in some way or other it wants to `take’, instead of crying
out to learn to `give’. Everyone who feels the earth is a prison,
every great soul that longs for deliverance: unconsciously, they
all call up the world of ghosts.

Do you likewise. But consciously!

I do not know whether there is some invisible hand to aid all
those that call up the ghosts unconsciously by forming islands
for them in the marshes they blunder into. I do not dispute it, but
I doubt it.

When, on the path of awakening, you pass through the realm
of ghosts, you will gradually come to see that they are nothing
but thoughts, which have suddenly become visible to your sight.
That is the reason why you see them as beings, and also why they
seem strange, for the language of forms is different from the language of the brain.

That is the time when the strangest metamorphosis that can
happen to you will take place: the people around you will turn
into ghosts. All that youhaveloved will become phantoms, your
own body as well. It is the most fearful solitude imaginable: a
pilgrimage through the desert, and anyone who does not find the
spring of life will die of thirst.

Everything I have told you here, can be read in the writings
of the holy men of all peoples: the coming of a new kingdom,
the awakening, the overcoming of the body, the solitude; and yet
there is an unbridgeable gap separating us from those holy men:
they believe the day is approaching when the good will enter
paradise and the evil be cast down into the pit. We know that a
time is coming when many will awake, and they will be separated from the sleepers like the lords from the slaves, because
the sleepers cannot understand those that are awake; we know
that there is no good and no evil, only ‘right’ and ‘wrong’; they
believe that staying ‘awake’ is keeping their eyes and their
senses open and their body alert during the night, so that they
can say their prayers; we know that ‘waking’ is the awakening
of the immortal self and that the sleeplessness of the body is its
natural consequence; they believe that the body must be despised and neglected, because it is sinful; we know that there is no
sin; the body is our starting-point, we came down to earth to
transform it into spirit; they believe they should take their body
into solitude to purify the spirit; we know that our spirit must
first go into solitude to transfigure the body.

It is up to you to choose your path, ours or the other. It should
come of your own free will.

I cannot advise you; it is better to pick a bitter fruit of your
own choice, than to take another’s advice and find a sweet one,
that is too high on the tree.

Do not be like the multitude that know that it is written, `All
test, then take the best’, but yet go and do not test and take the
first that comes to hand.”

The text seemed to break off at the end of that page, but after
some searching, Hauberrisser thought he had found the continuation. The unknown person, to whom the papers were ad dressed, seemed to have decided to take the `heathen path of
mastery over thought’, for the author went on with his instruction on a new sheet with the title,

The Phoenix

“This day you have been accepted into our community; from
now on you are a new link in the chain that stretches from
eternity to eternity. With that my task is finished, it will be taken
over by another, whom you cannot see as long as your eyes still
belong to this earth.

He is infinitely far away from you and yet close by; he is not
separated from you by space, and yet is farther away than the
farthest comers of the universe; you are surrounded by him, just
as someone swimming in the ocean is surrounded by water, and
yet you are not aware of him, just as the swimmer will not taste
the salt if the nerves on his tongue are dead.

Our symbol is the phoenix, the symbol of renewal, the mythical Egyptian eagle with red and gold feathers which makes a
pyre of its nest of myrrh and rises anew from its ashes.

I told you that the body is our starting point; once you know
that, you are ready to begin your journey. Now I will teach you
the first steps.

You must detach yourself from your body, but not as if you
wanted to abandon it; you must release yourself from it as if you
were separating light from warmth.

Here the first enemy is already lying in wait for you.

If you tear yourself away from your body, in order to fly
through space, you are following the path of the witch, who
merely draws a ghostly body out of the coarse, earthly one and
rides on it as on a broomstick to the witches’ sabbath.

With a sound instinct, mankind has erected a bulwark against
this danger in the smile with which it greets any suggestion that
such black arts should be taken seriously. You no longer need
the protection of doubt, you already possess a better sword in
what I have given you. The witches believe they are attending
the devil’s sabbath, when in reality their bodies are lying on their
beds, rigid and unconscious. They merely exchange earthly for spiritual perception, they lose the better part to win the worse;
it is impoverishment instead of an enrichment.

That alone should tell you that it is not the path of awakening.
Men commonly believe they are their bodies, and to come to
understand that this is not the case, you must learn what weapons the body uses to maintain its mastery over you. At the
moment, of course, you are so deep in its power that you are
plunged into darkness whenever it closes its eyes, and your life
would be snuffed out if its heart should stop beating. You believe you make it move, but that is an illusion: it moves itself,
using your will as a lever. You believe you create ideas; no, it
sends them to you, so that you think they come from yourself
and do everything it wants.

Sit upright and resolve not to move at all, to remain as
motionless as a statue, and you will see how at once it will attack
you furiously to try and force you to submit to it. It will shower
you with missiles until you allow it to move again. And its fury
and the haste, with which it shoots dart after dart at you, will tell
you, if you pause to think, how fearful for its mastery it must be
and how great your power must be if it is so afraid of you.

But there is another ruse in all this: it wants you to believe that
it is here, in physical control, that the decisive battle for the
sceptre is fought. But that is only a skirmish, which it will let you
win, if necessary, only to have you even more firmly under its
yoke. Those who win such minor affrays become the most
wretched slaves; they imagine they are victorious and on their
brows they bear the stigma: ‘a man of character’.

Taming your body is not the goal you are seeking. If you
forbid it to move, then you only do that in order to acquaint
yourself with the forces it has at its command. There are hosts
of them, they are so numerous as to be almost unconquerable.
If you insist on continuing with the apparently simple test of
sitting still, it will send them out against you, one after the other
first of all the brute force of the muscles, which want to twitch
and tremble; then the seething of the blood which covers your
face in sweat; the thumping of the heart; the shivering of the skin
until your hair stands on end; the unexpected jerk of the body,
as if gravity had suddenly changed its axis - all of this you can overcome, apparently through your will; but it is not your will
alone, there is already a higher wakefulness that stands invisible
behind it.

This victory, too, is of no value. Even if you could control
your breathing and your heart-beat, that would only make you
a fakir, and what does that mean in our language but `a poor
man’.

`A poor man’, that says it all.

The next warriors your body will send out against you will be
thoughts, whirring round you like a swarm of flies. Against
them, the sword of will-power is of no use. The more you strike
out at them, the more furiously will they buzz around yourhead;
even if you do manage to drive them off for a second, you will
just fall asleep and will have been defeated just the same.

It is impossible to command them to be still; there is but one
way of escaping from them: by fleeing to a higher wakefulness.
What you must do to achieve that, you must find out for yourself.
All I can tell you is that you must be firm and decisive and at the
same time feel your way tentatively with your heart

Any advice anyone else might give you for this agonising
struggle is as poison. You are faced with a precipice and no-one
can help you overcome it but yourself.

The important thing is not to rid yourself ofthese thoughts for
good, the purpose of your battle with them is to enter the state
of higher wakefulness. Once you have achieved that, the realm
of ghosts, of which I have already spoken to you, will be near.
You will see apparitions, both terrible and radiant, that will try
to make you believe they are beings from another world. They
are merely thoughts in visible form, over which you do not yet
have power.

The more sublime they appear, the more lethal they are,
remember that!

Many a mistaken belief is founded on such apparitions, and
has dragged mankind down into darkness. In spite of that, each
one of these spectres conceals a deeper meaning. They are not
mere pictures; irrespective of whether you can understand their
symbolic language or not, they are signs of each stage of your
spiritual development.

The transformation of your fellow human beings into ghosts
which, as I told you, will follow this stage, contains, like everything else in the spiritual realm, both a poison and healing
power. If you do not get beyond the point where you see people
solely as ghosts, then you will drink only the poison and will
become like those, of whom it is said, `though they speak with
the tongues of men and of angels and have not love, they are
become as sounding brass’. If, however, you find the ‘deeper
meaning’ concealed within each of these spectral people, then
you will be able to see with your spiritual eye not only their
living core, but also your own. Then will everything that was
taken from you be returned, as to Job, a thousandfold; then you
will be - back where you started, as the foolish say in their
mockery; they do not know that it is one thing to stay at home,
and quite another to return home after one has been abroad for
a great length of time.