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

Had Paul Amadeus happened to be born in the Indies, he would have expressed himself without a second thought. He would have talked, even as early as 1922, about his two lives, the self-cognisance of the ego, the reminiscences of incomparable richness, his other existence, which had developed in such different periods. However, Dienach was born a European, a Central European in fact, the offspring of a highly educated German-speaking Swiss man and his Salzburgian exceptional mother. He was always careful with his words, cautious not to let slip things that went beyond rationality and scientific, cognitive thinking. He strongly believed, all the same, in a spiritual element of an undefined nature in man, which eludes the law of biological decay, surpassing the barriers of time and space. He believed this was true not only for our own biological species, at least in the finest cases of individuals, but also in a variety of superior species of beings endowed with thought, language and feelings, with emotional wealth he meant to say, on millions of planets, unknown to us for the time being. It is thanks to this, Dienach says, that cultivated man, individuality enriched with values of inner culture, rises above confined and cruel biological fate. It is thanks to this element, which could be, as he said, much different from the one-sided view of the soul-unit of religious faith or other established spiritual preachings and convictions, that free spirit continues to exist unfettered by the law of biological evolution and decay. Regarding the course of the individual’s spiritual being, the time-space continuum is not an obstacle—he saw

it and he lived it—as he writes in his manuscripts.

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It was only in the field of celestial mechanics and generally of research of the natural universe that we humans managed to become Copernicans,” I remember him telling me when he talked to me about the course of the human spirit through the centuries. “Our entire philosophy and our worldview continue to be Ptolemaic: geocentric and anthropocentric.”

He would often speak of the triple blinders of time, space and biological species—the finite, that is, cognitive sensors, inherent spiritual abilities and knowledge potential of the human-receiver—which prevent us from acquiring a superior perception and view of the world and life. At the same time, he believed—something quite astounding given the times—in the possibility of a future expansion of the limits of the worlds of existing things, the worlds of Being.

He often talked about a majority of spiritual civilisations and a parallel upward course of myriads of biological species within the cosmos, of myriads of species of rational beings existing on a large number of golden celestial spheres, about a progress and evolution of a moral rather than a technological nature. He would not concede that our planet is the only inhabited celestial body or that our biological species is unique,

the crown of Creation. He disapproved of excessive technological development and the forms of techno-economic societies, considering them of secondary importance, and believed that what mainly served the great purposes of Creation was the elevation by means of noble pain, abnegation, kindness, love, self-sacrifice—inner cultivation in general.

However, he had never talked about the rare fate of his private life—so much rarer in our European, geographical and intellectual sphere. Neither had he told me much about the content of his manuscripts, which he had decided to send me upon leaving. He had given me quite a few pages and I had read them while he was still alive, causing me to experience an indescribable thirst to read these manuscripts. Nonetheless, when he spoke, the many wonderful things he talked about seemed to be his deepest beliefs, but not experiences he had truly lived.

Up to the day I lost track of him, I recall that he did not strike me as a type of mystic, endowed with elements of the exceptional or the supernatural. He appeared to be a very cautious, careful and reserved Western European, a restless philosophical spirit of the 20th century, like the “next century’s Faust”, but without the latter’s versatile education; Dienach seemed to be a simple educator, who had, however, burning questions, with that longing of the heart that honours the human race. He possessed an irresistible longing in an age of materialism and pragmatism, which the final decades of the 19th century had passed down to the first decades of the 20th. It was perhaps in this intellectual clime, where he was born, raised and became a man, in this exact context of intellect and scientific perception of the world where his education lay. It was perhaps precisely to this that he owed his great hesitance and cautiousness about even hinting at anything that lay beyond what was established, what was accepted on the basis of rationality or facts of the positive sciences.