Zones of the Spirit: A Book of ThoughtsStrindberg, August
Religion
Zones of the Spirit: A Book of Thoughts
Strindberg, August
Swedish literature
=A "Taking" Religion.=--The pupil said: "When Buddhism, mixed
with Vedantism, became fashionable in 1890, all the renegades from
Christianity flocked to it and tried to fill the vacuum in their
religious lives. Six thousand new gods were received with applause
forthwith; the new trinity--Brahma, Vishnu, Siva--encountered no
objections; spirits, ghosts, genies, fairies were thought quite
natural; Gautama's heaven and hell were thrown into the bargain,
accompanied by a slight flavour of asceticism. Those who denied the
Resurrection found reincarnation quite a simple affair. But the
favourite was Krishna. He was the incarnation of the god Vishnu, who
descended to earth in order to be born of earthly parents and to save
fallen humanity. His coming was prophesied, and so dreaded that a
massacre of new-born infants like that at Bethlehem was plotted, but
unsuccessfully. Krishna fulfilled his mission, conquered the evil
powers, and finally endured a voluntary death. That 'took'! The trinity
Brahma, Vishnu, Siva 'took,' but Father, Son, Holy Spirit did not
'take.' Krishna 'took,' but not Christ. It was strange!"
=The Sixth Sense.=--The pupil continued: "The outer eye can
reflect images, the inner eye can conceive them. There are therefore
two kinds of sight, an outer and an inner. Of the senses, that of
smell is the most immediate when it has to do with the conveyance
of impressions. But there seem also to be two kinds of faculties of
smell. Swedenborg says that a false man smells of sour gastric juice,
but only for the person to whom he has been false. In this case the
smell-perception is only subjective, but it is of great objective value
in judging men. In this case the organ of smell seems to operate with
æther-waves. According to Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondences,
good men exhale sweet perfume, and bad men a stench like that of
corpses. He says that misers smell like rats, and so on. Legends of
the saints relate that the corpses of those who have kept their souls
and bodies pure, when they dissolve, exhale a flower-like perfume.
In short, every soul has its scent, which varies according to its
characteristics.
"This sixth sense the clothes-hygienist Jäger believed he had
discovered after he had begun to observe and train his outer and
inner man. I will speak now of my own experiences in the matter. They
did not begin till I had passed through the great purgatorial fire
which burnt up the rubbish of my soul, and after I had scrambled out
of the worst of the mire by self-discipline and asceticism. They are
accustomed to boil off the gum from raw silk before it is spun, and
so my nerve-fibres seemed to have been 'scoured' by the sufferings of
life, and gone through a process like the 'fining' of silk."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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