A CONFESSION [27]
again I imagined *that* God -- our Creator in Three Persons who
sent His Son, the Saviour -- and again *that* God, detached from
the world and from me, melted like a block of ice, melted before my
eyes, and again nothing remained, and again the spring of life
dried up within me, and I despaired and felt that I had nothing to
do but to kill myself. And the worst of all was, that I felt I
could not do it.
Not twice or three times, but tens and hundreds of times, I
reached those conditions, first of joy and animation, and then of
despair and consciousness of the impossibility of living.
I remember that it was in early spring: I was alone in the
wood listening to its sounds. I listened and thought ever of the
same thing, as I had constantly done during those last three years.
I was again seeking God.
"Very well, there is no God," said I to myself; "there is no
one who is not my imagination but a reality like my whole life.
He does not exist, and no miracles can prove His existence, because
the miracles would be my imagination, besides being irrational.
"But my *perception* of God, of Him whom I seek," I asked
myself, "where has that perception come from?" And again at this
thought the glad waves of life rose within me. All that was around
me came to life and received a meaning. But my joy did not last
long. My mind continued its work.
"The conception of God is not God," said I to myself. "The
conception is what takes place within me. The conception of God is
something I can evoke or can refrain from evoking in myself. That
is not what I seek. I seek that without which there can be no
life." And again all around me and within me began to die, and
again I wished to kill myself.
But then I turned my gaze upon myself, on what went on within
me, and I remembered all those cessations of life and reanimations
that recurred within me hundreds of times. I remembered that I
only lived at those times when I believed in God. As it was
before, so it was now; I need only be aware of God to live; I need
only forget Him, or disbelieve Him, and I died.
What is this animation and dying? I do not live when I lose
belief in the existence of God. I should long ago have killed
myself had I not had a dim hope of finding Him. I live, really
live, only when I feel Him and seek Him. "What more do you seek?"
exclaimed a voice within me. "This is He. He is that without
which one cannot live. To know God and to live is one and the same
thing. God is life."
"Live seeking God, and then you will not live without God."
And more than ever before, all within me and around me lit up, and
the light did not again abandon me.
And I was saved from suicide. When and how this change
occurred I could not say. As imperceptibly and gradually the force
of life in me had been destroyed and I had reached the
impossibility of living, a cessation of life and the necessity of
suicide, so imperceptibly and gradually did that force of life
return to me. And strange to say the strength of life which
returned to me was not new, but quite old -- the same that had
borne me along in my earliest days.
I quite returned to what belonged to my earliest childhood and
youth. I returned to the belief in that Will which produced me and
desires something of me. I returned to the belief that the chief
and only aim of my life is to be better, i.e. to live in accord
with that Will. and I returned to the belief that I can find the
expression of that Will in what humanity, in the distant past
hidden from, has produced for its guidance: that is to say, I
returned to a belief in God, in moral perfection, and in a
tradition transmitting the meaning of life. There was only this
difference, that then all this was accepted unconsciously, while
now I knew that without it I could not live.
What happened to me was something like this: I was put into
a boat (I do not remember when) and pushed off from an