Chronicles From The Future: The amazing story of Paul Amadeus Dienach

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.