TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION (1972) OF THE VALLEY OF THE ROSES
(Pre-introductory and Critical Note, a kind of Preface, to Dienach’s published remnants. It was written six years prior to the first edition of The Valley of the Roses [1972]).
Dienach’s “Chronicles From The Future” (“Pages from a Diary” was the original title of the first edition) offers the essence of the cultural development of Western Europeans in the distant future. More specifically, here, right after Dienach’s “First” and “Second Diary”, the continuation of Western civilization’s history, from the 21st century onwards, is illustrated over a long period of time. Outwardly, however, these prophetic manuscripts are very simple in form: they appear to be passages of travel fiction, a time travel to the countries of our continent, to those distant future times, a panoramic view of social and spiritual life, within that distant future cultural development—pieces of a vivid and real life as seen and known by the author, who hereby narrates it as a traveller-narrator. It was, he says, his own fate that his life be bound, as he writes, with one of the rarest meta-psychic and spiritualistic phenomena. It was thanks to this that he managed to experience all he describes.
Paul Amadeus Dienach left neither a name nor, most probably, the slightest publication in his homeland. In autumn 1922, he arrived from central Europe in Athens and later on, in winter, started tutoring students of limited financial means in foreign languages, namely French and German for a small fee. Having spent, as he said, his childhood in one of the various districts of Zurich, where his parents had settled after his birth, he went on to spend his adolescence in a village, close to this big cultural hub of Germanic-speaking countries. Afterwards, he pursued humanistic studies, with a particular flair for history of civilisation and classical studies.
In 1906, he briefly worked as a teacher, in a private school most likely, perhaps in one of the towns surrounding Zurich. Being of weak and delicate constitution—he had the appearance of an intellectual—he travelled, though rarely and as much as he could afford, to the West and South. Of his travels to Paris and Rome, I gather he has written about it somewhere in his manuscripts.
I remember his deep affection for his mother, who appears to have been a saintly woman from all that he told me and, above all, a wonderful mother. When I met him, she had already passed away.
As he was leaving the manuscripts in my care, he had called me “his most appreciated one in his small circle of students” and I remember him using the phrase “my young friend”. It is nothing but obvious that feelings of loneliness and desolation flooded his soul at the time of writing the note. None of his family was left. At some other point, he had told me: “He who has not experienced isolation cannot know its meaning.”
He passed away, I gather, in the Athenian suburb of Maroussi or perhaps on his way back to his homeland, through Italy, in some town of our neighbouring peninsula, most probably during the first six months of 1924, after suffering an attack of tuberculosis, which manifested in Athens and did not last but a few months. Over the course of my twelve recent summer trips to Zurich, from 1952 to 1966, I did not manage to locate his relatives or other traces of the Dienach family. Maybe, however, he has distant relatives of the new generation on the outskirts. It could be, nevertheless, that the young anti-Hitler reserve officer of the German Occupation army was right—I shall write about his version further down, at the end of this pre-introductory note—that my teacher “suffered from the complex of his people’s guilt” of the imperial era. In this last case, one would search in vain outside the German ethnicity to find him based on a “borrowed” surname.
Had Paul Amadeus happened to be born in the Indies, he would have expressed himself without a second thought. He would have talked, even as early as 1922, about his two lives, the self-cognisance of the ego, the reminiscences of incomparable richness, his other existence, which had developed in such different periods. However, Dienach was born a European, a Central European in fact, the offspring of a highly educated German-speaking Swiss man and his Salzburgian exceptional mother. He was always careful with his words, cautious not to let slip things that went beyond rationality and scientific, cognitive thinking. He strongly believed, all the same, in a spiritual element of an undefined nature in man, which eludes the law of biological decay, surpassing the barriers of time and space. He believed this was true not only for our own biological species, at least in the finest cases of individuals, but also in a variety of superior species of beings endowed with thought, language and feelings, with emotional wealth he meant to say, on millions of planets, unknown to us for the time being. It is thanks to this, Dienach says, that cultivated man, individuality enriched with values of inner culture, rises above confined and cruel biological fate. It is thanks to this element, which could be, as he said, much different from the one-sided view of the soul-unit of religious faith or other established spiritual preachings and convictions, that free spirit continues to exist unfettered by the law of biological evolution and decay. Regarding the course of the individual’s spiritual being, the time-space continuum is not an obstacle—he saw it and he lived it—as he writes in his manuscripts.
“It was only in the field of celestial mechanics and generally of research of the natural universe that we humans managed to become Copernicans,” I remember him telling me when he talked to me about the course of the human spirit through the centuries. “Our entire philosophy and our worldview continue to be Ptolemaic: geocentric and anthropocentric.”
He would often speak of the triple blinders of time, space and biological species—the finite, that is, cognitive sensors, inherent spiritual abilities and knowledge potential of the human-receiver—which prevent us from acquiring a superior perception and view of the world and life. At the same time, he believed—something quite astounding given the times—in the possibility of a future expansion of the limits of the worlds of existing things, the worlds of Being.
He often talked about a majority of spiritual civilisations and a parallel upward course of myriads of biological species within the cosmos, of myriads of species of rational beings existing on a large number of golden celestial spheres, about a progress and evolution of a moral rather than a technological nature. He would not concede that our planet is the only inhabited celestial body or that our biological species is unique, the crown of Creation. He disapproved of excessive technological development and the forms of techno-economic societies, considering them of secondary importance, and believed that what mainly served the great purposes of Creation was the elevation by means of noble pain, abnegation, kindness, love, self-sacrifice—inner cultivation in general.
However, he had never talked about the rare fate of his private life—so much rarer in our European, geographical and intellectual sphere. Neither had he told me much about the content of his manuscripts, which he had decided to send me upon leaving. He had given me quite a few pages and I had read them while he was still alive, causing me to experience an indescribable thirst to read these manuscripts. Nonetheless, when he spoke, the many wonderful things he talked about seemed to be his deepest beliefs, but not experiences he had truly lived.
Up to the day I lost track of him, I recall that he did not strike me as a type of mystic, endowed with elements of the exceptional or the supernatural. He appeared to be a very cautious, careful and reserved Western European, a restless philosophical spirit of the 20th century, like the “next century’s Faust”, but without the latter’s versatile education; Dienach seemed to be a simple educator, who had, however, burning questions, with that longing of the heart that honours the human race. He possessed an irresistible longing in an age of materialism and pragmatism, which the final decades of the 19th century had passed down to the first decades of the 20th. It was perhaps in this intellectual clime, where he was born, raised and became a man, in this exact context of intellect and scientific perception of the world where his education lay. It was perhaps precisely to this that he owed his great hesitance and cautiousness about even hinting at anything that lay beyond what was established, what was accepted on the basis of rationality or facts of the positive sciences.
Ever since the day the handwritten translation of his manuscripts resurfaced, his distant remembrance returned unintentionally and insistently occupied my thoughts. This time, I took the final decision to have them published as soon as I saw them emerge from the old drawer one morning while looking for something else. Among them, I also discovered with some excitement some favourite yellowed letters and a notebook with notes from when I used to study along with other students whom I remember fondly.
A strange thing happened to me with Dienach: in those days of old, he was for me just an acquaintance of a few months. My carefree spirit at the time and, besides, the big age difference would not allow for a bond to develop between us worthy of being called friendship. But the more years went by, the more I realised that, when leaving for Italy in 1924—going there to die—Dienach had bequeathed a huge part of his soul to me. Thus, my spiritual connection with him flourished upon his death. A simple earlier acquaintance with this man of unique and unprecedented personal fate in life slowly became compassion and friendship over time.
As I later understood, he had formed the impression that from our entire group, a lively bunch of young students, I had somehow treated him better. The truth is I found him less boring that the rest did and, besides, I had set my mind on learning a foreign language at the time. Therefore, it is not strange that we happened to spend entire evenings together talking about all sorts of things. I shall always remember that cautiousness in his words as I mentioned before, even though he liked to exchange views with me—more than with the rest—on various philosophical and historical issues.
During the first years after his death, every time I read his manuscripts—I had since started translating them as best as I could and that was the case from 1926 to 1940—I would always say to myself: “Look, Dienach was set on writing literature. He attempted to portray a mentally ill character and by inventing a myth, a plot, he found the way to write his own ideas on all sorts of things.”
At the time, I was infused with scepticism, something very common for students of my time. I refused to believe anything defying the accepted laws of nature. I actually remember finding that religiousness flooding Dienach’s thinking, evident in the pages of his Diary, somehow exaggerated. As time went by, I realised how little we humans know of these laws and how thoughtless it would be to entirely exclude phenomena regarding psychological functions that defy the ordinary, rare as they may be.
But even more so, the more years went by, the better I pondered on some incidents from the time of my acquaintance with Dienach, some of his reserved words, which only now could truly interpret. In this way, my conviction that all these manuscripts written by a dead man, the sad man with the deep-set eyes who seemed so tedious to the rest of us—as one companion of ours had said not entirely unfairly one day—was actually his Diary. I have now come to believe that this man, who was probably not highly educated or intelligent, this practically unemployed man in his final years, who was neither a craftsman of language, as is evident from his manuscripts (futile were the translator’s efforts to simplify the style in some cases, without betraying the meaning; to present the phrase less presumptuous and not so brightly coloured and ornate with all kinds of adjectives—as Dienach was given to waxing lyrical quite often, which he actually admits somewhere in his manuscripts), nor had professed having any other job in his homeland, apart from teaching, did not write of figments of his own imagination and nor could he have all those things he wrote about within him. He did nothing but narrate what happened in his life and what was meant for him to see and live by a strange turn of events.
One more thing: Dienach did not invent a mentally ill character, but was ill himself, even before the attack of tuberculosis, I mean to say. He was an aloof and whiny hypochondriac, to say the least—notice his never-ending complaining in his writings—and hypersensitive almost to a pathological degree. He did not wish to speak of his two past illnesses (in 1917 and 1921-1922). Still, I recall him vaguely telling me at some point that “lethargic sleep is not an enigma for science anymore” and that “this reaction of the neuro-psychological system, this defence mechanism can be beneficial at times when neural cells are overcharged. It contributes to regulating their alternating current flow and protects them from impending collapse”. In either case, had it not been for his illness, he would not have encountered such fate in his life, which nowadays astounds us.
Who, indeed, could have predicted that this man’s illness would take such an incredible and unique turn? Much has been said about the unknown powers hidden within the human soul. It is true that we are unaware of thousands of things that exist and that thousands of things happen around us about which we are clueless. Nevertheless, who would ever speak of such potential of the human psychodynamics that resembles a miracle? Of course, this does not mean every emotionally overloaded psychological state bears such incredible potential, as was Dienach’s case. However, certain similar states—few among the many—may appear to lead to such parapsychic (or metapsychic) wanderings, as was the case of the spirit of these manuscripts’ author.
I recall that in 1923 we only saw Dienach as a man whose life was crushed by incurable sadness. Back in those days, the phrase “some great love affair” would frivolously come to our smiling and slightly sarcastic lips. Indeed, the writings in his “First Notebook” show that he was a man who had failed at his job and ended up being good at nothing in life due to his morbid predisposition of the incurable romantic and his unfortunate love affair (See e.g. Dec. 6, 1918 [First Edition]: I was telling myself to be strong, pull myself together and go out—but I couldn’t. Jan 17, 1919 [First Edition]: I feel guilty towards my mother, etc.). That exaggerated purple prose and those repetitions here and there, along with quite a few redundancies, retained by the translator, as well as that excessive sentimentality are everywhere to be found in his manuscripts.
It is true, however, that every time he was not absent-minded or lost in his never-ending daydreaming, it was interesting to talk to him. He would often like to ask us about our studies. In fact, during one of our conversations, he told us that he had also pursued history and classical studies in his homeland when he was young, but a few years later, an illness forced him to permanently leave his job.
Another time, when someone asked him about his choice to come and live in Greece, he told us, revising his first strange answer that he did it “for reasons of nostalgia”, that he came motivated, as many others, by love for this renowned city.
“And besides,” he added with that hesitance in his voice—the same voice he used every time he had doubts whether his words would come across as right and rational—“I had this wish to see a place that lives two lives, divided by twenty entire centuries.”
The fact that a kind of nostalgia was dogging him once again here in Greece as well was evident to anyone spending time with him. As every ailing person, he would also blame the place and the climate. In fact, I believe that this man, who felt at times, as we would say about him then, that “life was too short for him” wherever he went, he could not manage to get these thoughts out of his head: “Where could the exit be?” In the end, he had stopped teaching and spent, as we found out afterwards, the final months of his life in a somewhat dismal financial situation.
He was not interested in material needs. Instead, he was tormented by the thought of dying young—as it finally came to be before he had turned thirty-eight— and that he would not have enough time to write, as only he knew how, the history of European culture, which was his lifelong dream. “In two volumes,” he would fervently say. He was convinced he could. The only thing lacking was time. When I asked him about how he would divide the historical periods and he told me that the first volume would reach up to our great 19thcentury, he felt my puzzlement at that moment. He immediately hinted, hesitantly and vaguely, that he had his own personal methodological convictions and that the second volume would be more of a critical work. However, it was obvious there was something more to this. It was only when the Diary reached my hands and I started reading it that I realised that Dienach intended to reach up to spring 3906 in that second volume. He had been hiding this from me during our conversations. How bright his face was, I recall, how bright… Every single time I bring that moment to mind, I feel the faith that kindled and inspired him stronger—the conviction that he knew all that came later and that he could narrate it—if only, he said, he had been given health and available time by fate. He had the courage to do so. “There are,” he said, “occasions, very rare, to be honest, when we already know what the future holds for us. We have so many incidents where forward knowledge clearly manifested itself.”
Last night (The “Pre-introductory and Critical Note” was written in 1966), I was once again skimming through the pages of the translated version of the Diary and my mind went back to him. Many old things have since been lost, but I had never forgotten that I had these manuscripts in my possession. In fact, the more the years went by and the carelessness of youth faded, the more the thought of them would haunt me with pangs of guilt.
I have pondered on their publication for a long time. Not only for reasons of the natural respect on behalf of a student towards the memory of his old teacher, but also due to the latter’s very rare case. It was thanks to the unprecedented fate of his private life that Dienach was lucky enough to be aware of many of the things that would occur many years hence—via the science of the space age—accessible to the wise and, in fact, via the methods of scientific research which natural sciences hold dear.
Many will say: “Is it possible for cases of such detailed memories of pre-existence to occur in the middle of Europe?” However, one should ask the following: “Why have people with such living memories of a previous existence only appeared in the East Indies?” The prevalence of materialism in the European lifestyle has reached exaggeration and positivism has infused the spirit of the European man to the extent of unbearable one-sidedness. The more you let go of these things, the more they do too.
Nowadays, the name Dienach is still unknown. It is natural to be absent from every index of writers, every encyclopaedia. However, there will come a day when he shall be an honoured and glorified name. The distant descendants of modern Western Europeans shall utter it with respect. There will come a time when one shall see all things he so thoroughly describes in his texts come true in Europe. He so vividly portrays them because he has seen them with his own two eyes. He has actually lived all that he narrates.
Just like the night they brought me the manuscripts, so it was two days ago, that I read until nightfall. Just like that time, I did not wish to turn the lights on. Just like that time, I thought I would suddenly see the figure of my distant friend in the still of the night, appearing between the two window panes that shone milky white in the darkness, as milky white as I remember my friend’s complexion from those times of old…
For all those who do not wish to hear anything about parapsychology, extra-sensory perception and cases of metapsychic phenomena, for those who do not accept anything beyond the limits of scientific thinking and data, Dienach did not see and live his writings, but invented them. He envisioned, that is, the course of future cultural developments of our species and more specifically the white race and as a matter of fact—daring to courageously and lastingly address—for a rather considerable period of time. Besides, he recorded his own convictions in each field of philosophical thinking (especially moral and cognitive-theoretic convictions), his own metaphysical beliefs.
According to this view, Dienach had put his own thoughts in the mouths of his heroes (Jaeger, Silvia, Lain, Cornelius, Stefan, Astrucci, Hilda, Syld and so on) of a rather novel narration. This, however, is hardly believable by anyone who had the chance to meet Dienach in person and was aware that he was not some exceptional genius and that his level of education was not so unique. This Central European, and he alone, assigns such a sublime meaning and such exceptional content to the world and life that he not only beautifies life, but he also even exceeds the conceptions of ancient Greek classical education and humanistic tradition, which does not, however, correspond to anything inexistence.
If one accepts the more rationalistic of the two explanations, one must say that Dienach’s texts are pages of applied futuristic sociology and an optimistic perspective in metaphysics. Some of the writer’s convictions are quite characteristic. We present them directly below.
Dienach does not foster the slightest appreciation for human cognitive abilities. He even considers a priori perceptions of the mind, for instance, time, space and classifications, too narrowly human. He says that the succession of time periods, yesterday, today, tomorrow, and even the concept of space are what is apparent. They appear to us in this form because they correspond to the perception sensors of human-receivers, to their mental capacities, that is, to their cognitive potential, intellect and rationality. The objective reality of time eludes us. It may very well not be our familiar linear time, with the sequence that we consider rational, with its rational flow, but deep down be an everlasting present. Similar is the case with space. It is impossible for man to perceive anything existing beyond three-dimensional space. There are, however, huge realities, which are included in this notion. For example, the dimension of depth eludes us. According to Dienach, underlying Kant’s simple moral demands of practical reason are excellent and unperceived realities, quite real, even though they are not accessible to human intellect. The new faculties, which the Homo Occidentalis Novus managed to acquire, added, as Stephan would tell Dienach, an endless ontological depth to reality, where the once moral demands of the old cognitive-theoretical version are included.
Objective ontological reality suffers no harm—it is just we that are incapable of perceiving it—because the perception sensors, the mind, human reason happens to be finite and imperfect. An objective being suffers no harm because the entire cognitive and psychic human structure, the entire rational organisation, happens to be weak by nature. In exactly the same way, for instance, ultraviolet and infrared rays suffer no harm regarding their objective existence and reality because the perception abilities of the human vision sensors happen to be inadequate.
He disapproves of the rise of rationality to an almighty cognitive power. He does not agree that human intellect is the only safe origin of spiritual life or that the cognitive function is the highest or that only what is acceptable by means of rational proof is related to ontological reality.
Regarding all science, if one excludes mathematics, as he says, Dienach has doubts about whether it gives us the real, objective picture of the natural universe. He stresses its fluid nature and speaks not of one natural science that is the most objectively valid—as it was believed in the 19th century—but of many subjective natural sciences, one for each different period. He considers the achievements of physics very useful to our empirical knowledge, their technical applications in the various fields of natural sciences and to the progress of material culture, but not to the knowledge of the true nature of beings. Fate has not provided us with the key to perceiving their objectivity. Our knowledge of all this is too human by definition. The proper knowledge of actual Being goes beyond our potential. As was the above mentioned case of the colour rays in the solar spectrum, such is the case here as well with the perception of the natural universe: for the living beings that humans are, senses are tools within nature, but also barriers. Our mental capacities, our knowledge potential, intellect, rationality, are tools within the worlds of existing things for the biological species of rational beings to which we belong, but they are also obstacles.
Dienach considers even the distinction between physics and metaphysics entirely human. It is the sensory perception of this particular biological species and its finite cognitive potential that limit them. We no longer live, he says, in the times of Aristoteles, Descartes or Kant, the times of worshipping human intellect and reason, as if these were something unattainable, unique and incomparable. The distinction human intellect has made between physics and metaphysics are subjective (for humans), but not objective. It is impossible, he says, to perceive how much reality (a reality of incredible grandeur and superb beauty), how much ontological validity may underlie all that we have become used to calling “spiritual worlds” a long time ago. The correct definition of this term is, according to Dienach, neither that which has no real ontological substance nor that which only exists in our spirit, but that whose objective existence and nature human-receivers lack the ability to perceive.
For thousands of years we believed humans to be the only species of living beings to have a higher spiritual life, inner cultivation, inner culture and a free spiritual personality. This erroneous conception of our uniqueness is, according to Dienach, the main reason we consider human cognitive abilities such as intellect and reason so satisfactory—almost infallible according to intellectuals and positivists. He says that this is the main reason we consider the human mind to be omniscient and rationalism to be absolutely valid and we say that if something truly exists, then it is impossible for our intellect not to perceive it.
The level man occupies among myriads of species of intellectual and rational beings is, Dienach says, quite superior. However, man is not the Crown of Creation unless, of course, we limit ourselves to the spiritual and intellectual life of our planet. All humanistic tradition, religious faith, the Greco-Roman spirit and Renaissance had, our author says, passed down to our Western Civilization the unshakable conviction that man is the spiritual centre of the universe. Our whole thinking is egocentric, anthropomorphic and geocentric. Myriads of different biological species are higher than our level and myriads of others are lower. In fact, the utterance “the heavens declare the glory of God” has, he says, meaning and content incomparably broader and higher than the one intended by those expressing it and generally by what people thought at those times. Positivists, intellectuals, empiricists, rationalists and critical philosophers are all mistaken, he says, in considering human perception sensors of imperfect and finite potential to be infallible. They are also wrong to hold that nothing exists apart from what is given and tested by the intellect, rationality and experience. A higher, truly higher, view of the world and life is not feasible, Dienach writes, as long as we continue to look at things exclusively from the human point of view, our own perspective and in light of our own mental capacity.
Another point worth noting in Dienach’s writings is his belief (he saw, he says, and knows) that the cognitive abilities of many other biological species provide an equally subjective image for all that exists—though much more perfect and complete than ours—even if these species are on a higher level than us in the scale of the myriads of species of rational beings. The finite element, he says, is inherent to the inevitable fate of organic matter, no matter how endowed the latter is with the divine spark beyond certain stages of its spiritual development and biological evolution. When the spirit comes to embrace matter, you cannot, he says, ever find perfection. There is no perfection in any of those creatures that are superior to us, in any of their functions corresponding to what we are used to calling ‘mind’, ‘reason’ and psychic-intellectual functions. They are also burdened by the fate of understanding only the apparent facets of reality, he says. In other words, they also have their own worldview, which they supposedly consider real due to their limited ability of ontological perception; in the same way, we have our own physical-scientific worldview, which we owe to Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg and the rest of our wise personages.
The most wondrous thing he writes about is that actual Being exists, the deeper essence of Being, that is, the objective and no longer the apparent reality. This Being exists beyond the thousands of subjective images in the field of ontology and generally in the sphere of knowledge and beyond all kinds of perceptions, which vary incredibly on those myriads of inhabited spheres and in the incredible breadth of time periods spanning millions of centuries. They vary, he says, depending on the level of the species of logical beings and even on the particular stage of their biological and spiritual development along with the various developmental stages of their psychic-spiritual functions. Human language cannot express this inconceivably large ontological reality, of course. Dienach, however, employs a term: the Samith. He actually believes that this term is not conventional, but it is a specific word of a peculiar language of the wise of those distant future times he discusses.
Let us suppose that one of the superior species of rational living beings somewhere in cosmic space could ever grasp the entire true nature of this objective ontological reality, its essence, its structure, its entire ontological content. Then, he says, we would immediately solve all the big and unknown problems of the world, a small part of which constitutes, also here on our Earth, an objective of our metaphysical pain, an object, that is, of unbearable spiritual thirst, of irresistible nostalgia of spirit and soul. These problems are the natural universe in its objective nature, the existence of God, the beginning and the end of beings, the deep mystery of life and its purpose, all sorts of teleological opinions, eternity and infinity. Moreover, the thousands of questions in metaphysics, the origins and the destination of people as well as their place in the entirety of Being, everything we hopelessly strive to understand, everything inconceivable but existing, of ontological substance, no matter how much it eludes the abilities of human intellect and the perception sensors of rationalism.
Dienach believes that it is feasible for superior living beings to have knowledge, not of the Samith’s essence, of course, which is impossible, but at least of its evident existence. He even says this could be feasible by people, though in the very distant future, upon long-lasting self-cultivation of the psychic-spiritual abilities of our species and an evolutionary course of a more moral nature.
This knowledge of Samith’s existence would suffice, according to Dienach, to put an end to man’s metaphysical angst and save the human spirit from the eternal fate of pain and doubt. Despite its inaccessible essence, the all-so-clear knowledge of the existence of that large ontological reality, which objectively exists, could not come to the chosen ones among us, to those whom fate would have given the divine grace of actually witnessing its existence. It could not come but in connection with that meaning of incredible and inconceivable grandeur and with the feeling of hyper- cosmic beauty it encompasses.
“Do not take these last words with their human meaning,” Dienach writes in some footnotes. “Alas,” he says, “upon hearing the word ‘grandeur’, we think of space, of range. The same applies for hyper-cosmic beauty, which is something beyond the limits of human psychic tolerance to great aesthetic joy and superb spiritual happiness and besides, something entirely inaccessible to the poor and finite perception potential of human aesthetic consciousness. Maybe, however, it is an unintentional foretelling. Maybe it is a distant reflection of it, which had once feebly shone in Goethe’s or Beethoven’s dreams and in those of other masters of artistic creation and philosophical thinking during the heyday of the European civilisation.
I recall Dienach writing somewhere else in his manuscripts, which were later lost, about Kant’s distinction between the beautiful (for example, in the great and immortal works of artistic creation and the perception of beauty by the cultivated lover of the arts) and the sublime (for example, at the sight of the starry dome and at the perception of the sublime by the sensitive religious person of advanced inner cultivation and rich spiritual culture). I also recall Dienach writing further down about Kant’s observation that the former causes deep aesthetic stirring while the latter brings about a sense of wonder and profound religiousness as well as a feeling of awe and veneration.
I remember Dienach not admitting to such a distinction, but, on the contrary, giving a single explanation for all this: he writes somewhere that an unbearable thirst of the soul pushes us towards these concepts. The Samith, however, is, deep down, the object of our nostalgia. Lacking it, we resort to all those things that give our spiritual world the impression of its worldly forms. They somehow grant us—though temporarily—some salvation from the unquenched thirst for the Samith within our own ambience of life. That is all we have in the cruel fate of our world.
Besides, Dienach continues, this need for salvation is the reason religions were established in the first place. Men feel that life is impossible without a religious feeling. This salvation is also pursued by artistic, and generally, creation in its various forms (composition of symphonic music, lyrical poetry, visual arts, treasures of the spirit in general). The same reason led to the construction, through the millennia, of an entire spiritual edifice of meritocratic convictions and high ideals (such as humanism, love, justice, altruism, freedom, education, and the spiritual urge towards moral completion). This need for salvation is the reason men became capable of expressing sublime moral demands to their Creator and suffering, fighting, sacrificing themselves, dying—without an ulterior motive, in the spirit of voluntary sacrifice—for high emotional and moral values. All this to quench, as much as possible—even temporarily—that unsatisfied, sacred thirst of the spirit and soul. The deepest reason, the true origins of the entire civilisation throughout history is this unrelenting spiritual tendency, this urge for salvation from the pain from the lack of the Samith, unconscious though we may be of it.
According to Dienach, the enlightened and worthy thinker should thus actually address the problem of the origins of civilisation. All that has ever been taught about it is, as he writes, superficial. Instead of considering the ever-evolving course of civilisation an expression of people’s strife and tendency to return to God, from whom they have been separated by sin (Gianbattista Vico), the essence of people’s social life (Auguste Comte), an outcome of the competition among social classes of conflicting financial interests (Karl Marx), the manifestation of biological evolution by means of youth and decline (Oswald Spengler), the fruit of older suppressed and repressed sexual desires, which return transformed and idealised and are externalised indifferent forms upon long-lasting unknowing processing in the depths of the subconscious (Sigmund Freud) or, finally, the manifestation of a tendency towards domination, supremacy and distinction, for the sake of reacting to the feeling of inferiority and weakness during childhood (Adler and other proponents of individual psychology), it is better, he says, to admit the deeper, truer reason. Even if Carl Jung, Dienach writes elsewhere, searches for the origins and the cause of works of civilisation in the vast richness of noble and high inclinations and tendencies encompassed in that hidden area of the psychic organism, man’s subconscious, it does not explain enough regarding the origins of this richness. They are not only hereditary features and refined instincts. This may also be the case, but these features are “absolutely secondary”. This interpretation lacks depth. Without the Samith, without the sacred thirst of the spirit and soul and our nostalgia for it, there could be no noble urges of the man’s soul towards things that are desirable, undiscovered, impossible and inexistent—inexistent and impossible in our meagre ambience of life—towards eternity, infinity, the divine, perfection and ideal beauty. Neither would the great acts of moral beauty exist, nor the attraction to sacrifice or anything beyond reason, to the beautiful, sublime, unexpressed and divine.
Dienach later talks about man’s future efforts to make a leap forward in the process of evolution, a gain of millennia in the long psycho-spiritual and moral maturity in a way to accelerate, as much as possible, the ability of acquiring direct knowledge. Men shall be able to do this when they have overcome this stage of technical-economic civilisation and once satisfied and satiated with the cultural achievements thereof, they shall turn to pursuits that are more spiritual. Dienach writes that if he understood correctly, the evolution of the intuition and second sight of the old times from their past embryonic state shall generate the acquisition of this new human spiritual ability. The new cognitive potential, the new experience, which shall render the knowledge of the Samith crystal clear—despite the inaccessibility of its essence—and shall also give that feeling of the incredible and inconceivable grandeur and hyper-cosmic superb beauty that is connected to It.
This astute species is restless, he writes somewhere. After its insane achievements in the technical universe, it suddenly enters new paths. It puts its hand to artificial development, reinforcement and activation of extremely old abilities, which had been lying dormant in the deepest parts of the psychic organism. It aspires to see this elusive secret light of no cognitive processing become evident, stable and conscious. What was once considered transcendent (In all his texts, Dienach uses the word transcendent in the meaning of metaphysical and hyper-cosmic. Throughout his manuscripts, Dienach calls transcendent the high realities, which stand above man’s perception sensors while fate has not given man knowledge thereof. The 18th and 19th centuries had doubted whether they corresponded to something existing. Dienach thought of them as realities in connection with the great metaphysical problems. He stresses the validity of their ontological substance.), what was true but inconceivable, real (existing) but unthinkable and inexpressible, our species wants to make them the object of evident knowledge here and now. Since intellect and reason have been proven unsuitable (he means to say insufficient) for this, this new, astute species acquires new cognitive potential (he means new perception sensors).
One of the main reasons Dienach was so hesitant to reveal himself to his friends at least and did not wish, as long as he lived, to have his manuscripts published, was the new terms, the neologisms he had to use at the time of his writing.(Generally, new words are one of Dienach’s greatest obstacles in expressing himself. He had found himself, he says, before thousands of new terms of another age of superior spiritual life, before thousands of new verbal expressions of a richer language, which was the linguistic instrument of a civilisation superior to our 20th century one. In many cases, he had to use these new words in their original form. However, he prefers using a periphrastic wording by means of our words where it is possible. Thus, for instance, the great rooms of teaching [5 of VI], the unions of willed competences [30 of VI], the office partners [14 of VI], the partners of herds, the service, the boulevards of the settlement [26 of VI], etc. constitute a German periphrastic rendition of the original one-word term. The same applies for the ambiance of this life, which intends to express the opposite of the concept of life after death or the opposite to the transcending course of the individual’s spiritual entity after biological death. The same applies for the peripheral far rooms of domes [20 of VII] and the established officials [Gretwirchaarsdag of September 6 for us] and many others.) The Nibelvirch, which attributes man’s acquisition of that new superior spiritual ability, above intellect and rationalism, that new perception sensor (knowledge potential) cannot, he says, be expressed in any of our languages by any term. Intuition and second sight are simplistic compared to it. Besides, hyper-vision very much reminds us of one of our own material (of the experience) senses. Still, that distant future age that Dienach’s manuscripts refer to frequently employs the term Oversyn or Supersyn as near synonyms to the Nibelvirch or actually as its outcome. Elsewhere it uses the terms direct knowledge, direct view and experience beyond reason interchangeably.
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