Observations placeholder

A Fundamental Experiment – Rene Daumal [translated by Roger Shattuck – 1987]

I insist on the triple nature of this certainty in order to anticipate three kinds of incomprehension in the reader.

• First, I want to keep lazy minds from falling into the illusion of understanding me when they find only a vague sense of the mystery of the beyond to correspond to my mathematical certainty.
• Second, I want to prevent psychologists and especially psychiatrists from treating my testimony not as testimony at all but as an interesting psychic manifestation worth studying and explaining by what they believe to be their 'psychological science'.
  It is in order to forestall their attempts that I have insisted on the experimental nature (and not simply the introspective experience) of my certainty.
• Third, at the very heart of this certainty, the cry: 'It's I, I who am at stake', should frighten the curious who think they might like to perform the same or a similar experiment. I warn them now, it is a terrifying experience, and if they want more precise information on its dangers, they can ask me in private. I do not mean the physiological dangers (which are very great); for if, in return for accepting grave illness or infirmity, or for a considerable shortening of the span of physical life, one could attain to a single certainty, the price would not be too high. I am not speaking, moreover, only of the dangers of insanity or of damage to the mind, which I escaped by extraordinary good luck. The danger is far graver, comparable to what happened to Bluebeard's wife: she opens the door of the forbidden room, and the horrible spectacle sears her innermost being as with a white hot iron.

After the first experiment, in effect, I was 'unhinged' for several days, cut adrift from what is customarily called 'the real'. Everything seemed to me an absurd phantasmagoria, no logic could convince me of anything, and, like a leaf in the wind, I was ready to obey the faintest interior or exterior impulse. This state almost involved me in irreparable 'actions' (if the word still applies), for nothing held any importance for me any longer. I subsequently repeated the experiment several times, always with exactly the same result; or rather I always found the same moment, the same instant eternally coexisting with the illusory unfolding of my life. Having once seen the danger, however, I stopped repeating the test.