— so that it once again becomes receptive to taking in God’s energy which results in and creates the personality, enclosed by God in itself, a personality that no longer dies and can be represented graphically like this:
However, the real surprise came after the question was posed of how that came about. Ernest categorically refused to play any sort of role in formulating a pseudo-Gnostic theory of the soul. He claimed that he had received his teaching from reputable members of the mystical order he belonged to, but about which he did not want to say anything more intimate. This, we could call it “oneiric” education, had begun when he was just seven years old. Every evening when he would fall asleep, his teachers would appear and give him lessons about the meaning of life on Earth. To my question: Who were those men? he answered that he did not know because they had been dead since long before he was born, but he had recently identified one of them as Angelus Silesius. As his education advanced he, Ernest, experienced reality more and more like the sphere of chaos, and his dreams as the intermediary space between the material world and spiritual world, and he called that awakening. In my later study I established that Ernest had not had a chance to become familiar with eastern philosophy and the Buddhist religion, to which, apparently, the expression awakening refers. I was interested in how it was possible for him to be taught by people who had died several centuries before. Ernest said that, in dreams, such things had no meaning, which is true, because the dead often visit our dreams, though in a different function to be honest.
By pure accident, those days I got a letter from an acquaintance from the world of art, with whom I had kept up correspondence for a certain time.
“As you know,” my acquaintance wrote among other things, “the process of the maturation of the human being is closely connected with upbringing and education; we teach our progeny the secrets and rules of life. We do not do anything like that with dreams. We dream, if I may say it that way, chaotically, randomly. Perhaps that is why we live as we do in reality: in chaos, like straws given over to the elements.”
Those few remarks helped me to assemble an acceptable view of Ernest’s disturbance. It is true that we live in a chaotic world where the illusions of order and a system trudge about. Ernest’s sensitivity, fostered by his Calvinistic upbringing, could not stand the state of disorder, dominant in the world; added to that was the inability to change things. And that is why Ernest fled into dreams, a purely subjective place, in which he established a corresponding system of values, at the top of which God was found. The absence of his father (whom he did not remember), created tortuous complexes in him that he rid himself of by projecting them into the figure of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (the father of the nation=the father in general); in doing so, he killed two birds with one stone: he gained a father (a being without a father has no ontological backing) and he killed him at the same time (a being with a father has no independence), without exposing himself to any kind of risk because his father was already dead, brutally murdered.
Ernest, who became more communicative after seven or eight sessions, had a different version: Franz Ferdinand has to be killed because he was the inheritor of the Western Roman Empire which wants to control the Eastern — Byzantium. I reminded him that he thus brought about an aporia: Byzantium had not existed for centuries, and Franz Ferdinand had already been killed. But that did not confuse Ernest in the least: “Yes, doctor, the Archduke has been killed, but that was agreed upon just last year in October; I know that you will not understand me, but I will tell you anyway: the things that happen now are prepared in the future, it is a waste of time to seek for the causes of things in the past. Death does not come from the past, but from the future. As far as Byzantium goes, it never ceased to exist, it just went from being an exoteric empire to being an esoteric one. All sorts of states spring up on its soil, but the whole is never lost in parts; only parts are lost — the external ones.” I must admit that Ernest had mastered a certain logic, similar to Berkeley’s, that is hard to penetrate. Anyway, if by chance he had been born in the century when his imaginary teachers were, there is no room for doubt that he would have been a figure worthy of respect, judging by the wildness of his imagination, equal to Angelus Silesius. But chance wanted him to be born in the 20th century from which he fled into the saving extra-territoriality of the Byzantine Empire.
And then, there was also another factor: his relationship with his mother. Since she had no husband, and did have a son, she was like the Holy Virgin and Ernest saw himself in the role of Messiah; he identified with the superego to the extent that he experienced it as his true self. But there was also the ego. A well adapted personality generally seeks (and finds) justifications for the actions of the ego. In Ernest’s case, the ego was experienced overall as interference; it was not able to do anything good. In other words: for Ernest, every action of the ego was wrong, in his case — because of his Calvinist upbringing — even sinful, which just made the situation worse. On several occasions I attempted to help Ernest become aware that he was ill after all. He never denied it, even once; the gurus in his dreams, purportedly, also told him that. But, Ernest added, the whole world is sick; there is not a single man who is not mentally ill. However, the sect to which he belonged had undertaken steps to fix that. Preparations are being made for the construction of some sort of fantastic hospital for 20,000,000 mental patients who will finally externalize the madness of the world and in that externalization make the madness disappear.
It was obvious that, as a result of his insufficient ego, Ernest was falling ever more frequently under the control of the unconscious. I will present some of my notes that support my conclusions:
“I have never been able,” Ernest said, “to say with confidence: I am so and so. But I believed others. I was convinced that that was happening only to me, that it was a rare disease that I had to conceal in order to exist at least on the surface. That is why I lived closed up in myself, unable to truly enter a conversation with anyone outside the circle of those already used to my presence, out of the fear that after just a few exchanges of words, others would realize that I don’t exist, that they would laugh and wave their hands, and that I would have to dissipate into the nothingness where I belong. I was stupid. Now I know that other people feel that way as well, but they just hide it out of habit, but also partially out of silly self-confidence. Yes, we hide behind the screen of our clothes and our titles, which are indeed real, as opposed to people. But we can only hide our nothingness from others with those things. Not from ourselves. We do not exist on the other side. The more important one. The one inside…
(…) I wondered how I would react to the news of my own death. I think I would remain calm. But I would still continue to go out for walks, to see my friends. Because we are all dead already; why get excited?”
No doubt, the causes of Ernest’s existential insecurity should be sought in the absence of his father. One who has no father does not have an object to identify himself with; between him and his ancestors (history), there is a gaping hole — nothingness; all who have gone before him are dead, and he experiences his existence as an act of betrayal. That is why the verse says: “When you fall asleep, die to this world.” That also suits his intolerance of time, symbolized in his breaking of clocks. However, this was not a rebellion against the time in which we are disappearing, but against the time in which we go on existing.