Page:The Quest Volume 11 (1919-20).djvu/552

 that they belong to the trunk, and so they wither away the first autumn. But I wanted to tell you how I first left my body.

"There is an old, old doctrine, as ancient as mankind itself. It has been handed on from mouth to ear until this day; but few know it. It teaches how to step over the threshold of death without losing consciousness. He who can rightly do so is henceforth master of himself. He has gained a new self, and what till then seemed his self becomes henceforth a tool just as now our hands and feet are organs for us.

"Heart-beat and breath are stilled as in a corpse when the newly rediscovered spirit goes forth,—when we go forth as once did Israel from the fleshpots of Egypt, and the waters of the Red Sea stood as walls on either side.

"Long and oft had I to practise, nameless and excruciating were the tortures I had to undergo, before I succeeded finally in freeing myself consciously from the body. At first I felt myself, as it were, hovering—just as we think ourselves able to fly in dreams—with knees drawn up yet moving quite easily.

"Suddenly I began gliding down. I found myself in a black stream running as it were from the south to the north. In our language we call it the flowing backwards of the Jordan. There was a roaring of waters, a buzzing of blood in the ears. In great excitement many voices—though I could not see their owners—cried out on me to turn back. A trembling seized upon me, and in dumb fear I swam towards a cliff that rose from the waters before me. Standing there in the moonlight was a naked child. But the signs of sex were absent, and in its forehead it had a third eye, like Polyphemus of old. It stood stock