Coates, A blue flame on the forehead
Artikel: A blue flame on the forehead / Eine blaue Flamme auf der Stirn
Artikel aus der Zeitschrift "New Yorker" 11.September 1943 von Robert M. Coates
Deutsch: Eine blaue Flamme auf der Stirn
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EIN REPORTER AUF GROSSER FAHRT
Die Besucherzahlen in den Kirchen der Großstädte sind zwar seit Kriegsbeginn etwas gestiegen, bleiben aber immer noch hinter den Erwartungen zurück, beklagen die Geistlichen. Man kann an einem Sonntag in fast jede Kirche der orthodoxen Konfession in der Stadt gehen und findet leere Kirchenbänke. Die gleiche Klage kann von den Pfarrern bestimmter anderer Gemeinden kaum erhoben werden. Das sind die Männer, die den so genannten informellen oder unorthodoxen Kirchen vorstehen, und ihre Zahl sowie die Größe ihrer Gemeinden ist in den letzten Jahren rapide gewachsen. Sie finden viele dieser Kirchen samstags in der Spalte mit den Kirchenankündigungen, die die Times auf ihrer Religionsseite veröffentlicht, und sie reichen von recht gut etablierten Organisationen wie Baha'i, Unity und New Thought über neuere wie die Church of the Healing Christ und die Church of the Absolute Center bis hin zu verschiedenen Anhängern des Vedantismus, Hinduismus, Spiritualismus usw. Mehrere dieser Gruppen verwenden das Wort "Kirche" eher locker, denn die Treffen finden eher in einem Hotel-Ballsaal als in einem herkömmlichen Gotteshaus statt. Einige der Pastoren sind lediglich Redner, die auf alle kirchlichen Utensilien verzichten und lediglich regelmäßige Sonntagsvorträge oder Predigten halten, in denen sie ihre Philosophien darlegen.
Im Allgemeinen sind diese "Kirchen" um einen Mann herum aufgebaut, der ein angenehm beeindruckendes Auftreten hat und die Fähigkeit besitzt, altmodische Bibellehre mit Anleihen aus der Psychoanalyse, der Glaubensheilung, der mentalen Telepathie, der Autosuggestion und gelegentlich dem Voodooismus zu vermischen. Allen gemeinsam ist, dass es ihnen gut geht. Dr. Emmet Fox zum Beispiel, der die Kirche des heilenden Christus leitet, füllt bei seinen Gottesdiensten am Sonntagmorgen regelmäßig das Manhattan Opera House, das viertausend Plätze fasst. Seine Lehre ist der der Christlichen Wissenschaft so ähnlich, dass sie, zumindest für den Laien, praktisch ununterscheidbar ist. Er glaubt, dass, wenn eine Person sich einer Periode der so genannten "heilenden Meditation" hingibt, alle falschen Wucherungen im Körper, wie z. B. Tumore, beseitigt werden können, Krankheiten geheilt werden können und fehlende Körperteile sogar dazu gebracht werden können, sich selbst zu ersetzen oder, wie er es ausdrückt, "getagt" zu werden und in neun Monaten neu geschaffen zu werden. Dr. Fox ist wahrscheinlich der erfolgreichste dieser Praktiker, wenn man den Erfolg in solchen Dingen an der Zahl der Anhänger misst. Aber das Wirken des Glaubens ist unberechenbar, und es wäre in der Tat eine harte Seele, die aus rein arithmetischen Gründen behaupten würde, dass das
Das Gewicht der Lehre von Dr. Fox ist gewaltiger als das von Joseph De Vincent, dessen Kirche des Absoluten Zentrums (acht bis fünfzehn Sonntagabende, Raum 1001, Steinway Hall) eine durchschnittliche Besucherzahl von nicht mehr als fünfzig oder sechzig Gläubigen aufweist. Ich habe mich seit einiger Zeit in solchen Gewässern umgesehen, um, wenn schon nicht die Wahrheit, so doch wenigstens ein gewisses Verständnis für die Anziehungskraft zu finden, die so viele Anhänger anzieht. Ich glaube, ich bin diesem Verständnis an einem Sonntag vor nicht allzu langer Zeit am nächsten gekommen, als ich einer Ansprache von Neville Goddard zuhörte. Neville Goddard (mit einer gewissen Selbstverständlichkeit nennt er sich gewöhnlich nur "Neville") spricht sonntags um 20 Uhr im Auditorium der Union Methodist Episcopal Church in der West Forty-eighth Street, und der Eintritt kostet fünfundzwanzig Cent.
MR. GODDARD, oder Neville, hat nicht so viele Zuhörer wie Dr. Fox, und seine Lehren sind nicht so extrem wie die einiger der anderen. In beiderlei Hinsicht liegt seine Position ziemlich in der Mitte des Weges. An dem Abend, an dem ich teilnahm, waren vielleicht zweihundert Personen anwesend, um die Botschaft zu hören. Das Auditorium der Unionskirche ist klein und fächerförmig, mit Reihen von Bänken, die sich zu einem Rednerpult auf einem kleinen Podest verengen, das als Kanzel dient, und die Menge füllte es bequem. Ich stellte fest, dass es mindestens sechsmal mehr Männer als Frauen gab, und da es warm war, saßen viele der Männer ohne Mantel. Obwohl ein Organist auf der Empore leise mit den Fingern durch die Mischung aus tiefen Akkorden und Fragmenten von Hymnenmelodien spielte, die normalerweise einem Gottesdienst vorausgeht, herrschte eine Atmosphäre der Ungezwungenheit, die an ein Theater vor dem Vorhang erinnerte. Die Leute winkten ihren Freunden in den anderen Bänken zu oder standen auf, um sich mit ihnen zu unterhalten. Als der Organist sein Stück beendet hatte, gab es sogar vereinzelten Applaus. Dann stand eine Frau mit auffallend leuchtend rotem Haar auf der Orgelempore und sang mit einer kräftigen Sopranstimme das "Ave Maria" von George B. Nevin. Als sie geendet hatte, gab es einen weiteren Beifallssturm. Einen Moment später trat Neville
Englisch: A blue flame on the forehead
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A REPORTER AT LARGE
ATTENDANCE at metropolitan churches, although it has risen somewhat since the war began, is still short, ministers complain, of what is desired. You can go into almost any church of orthodox denomination in town, of a Sunday, and find empty pews. The same complaint can hardly be made by the pastors of certain other congregations. They are the men who preside over what might be called the informal, or unorthodox, churches, and their number, as well as the size of their congregations, has been growing rapidly in recent years. You'll find many of these churches listed Saturdays in the column of church announcements the Times runs on its religious page, and they range from such fairly wellestablished organizations as Baha'i, Unity, and New Thought, through such newer ones as the Church of the Healing Christ and the Church of the Absolute Center, on to various practitioners in Vedantism, Hinduism, Spiritualism, and so on. Several of these groups use the word "church" rather loosely, for the meetings are as likely to occur in a hotel ballroom as in a conventional place of worship. Some of the pastors are merely orators who dispense with all ecclesiastical paraphernalia and simply offer regular Sunday lectures, or sermons, in which they expound their philosophies.
In general, these "churches" are built around a man with an agreeably impressive manner and an ability to mingle old-fashioned Bible teaching with borrowings from psychoanalysis, faith healing, mental telepathy, autosuggestion, and, occasionally, voodooism. The one characteristic common to all of them is that they are doing fine. Dr. Emmet Fox, for instance, who conducts the Church of the Healing Christ, regularly fills the Manhattan Opera House, which has a seating capacity of four thousand, at his Sun-, day-morning services. His doctrine is so close to that of Christian Science that, to the layman at least, they are practically indistinguishable. He believes that if a person will indulge in a period of what he calls "healing meditation," all false growths in the body, such as tumors, can be done away with, diseases can be cured, and missing parts of the body can even be made to replace themselves or, as he puts it, be "gestated," and in nine months' time be recreated. Dr. Fox is probably the most successful of these practitioners, if success in such matters is calculated in the number of followers. But the workings of faith are incalculable, and it would be a hardy soul indeed who would maintain, merely on arithmetical grounds, that the
weight of Dr. Fox's teaching is any more formidable than that, say, of Joseph De Vincent, whose Church of the Absolute Center (eight-fifteen Sunday evenings, Room 1001, Steinway Hall) boasts an average attendance of no more than fifty or sixty communicants. I have been casting about in such waters as these for some time, seeking, if not truth, at least some understanding of the appeal that attracts so many followers. I think I came nearest to that understanding one Sunday not long ago when I listened to an address by Neville Goddard. Mr. Goddard (with a certain stateliness, he ordinarily refers to himself merely as "Neville") speaks Sundays at 8 P.M. in the auditorium of the Union Methodist Episcopal Church, on West Forty-eighth Street, at an admission charge of twenty-five cents.
MR. GODDARD, or Neville, Commands no such audiences as does Dr. Fox, and his teachings are not as extreme as those of some of the others. In both these respects his position is fairly middle-of-the-road. The night I attended there were perhaps two hundred persons present to receive the message. The auditorium of the Union Church is small and fan-shaped, with rows of pews narrowing toward a lectern on a small dais which serves as pulpit, and the crowd filled it comfortably. Men, I noticed, were outnumbered at least six to one by women, and since it was warm a good many of the men sat with their coats off. Though an organist in the loft was fingering softly through that mixture of deep chords and fragments of hymn tunes which usually precedes a service, there was an air of,, informality in the atmosphere that suggested a theatre before curtain time. People waved to friends in other pews or got up to join them in little chats. When the organist finished his selection, there was even a round of scattered applause. Then a woman with startlingly bright red hair stood up in the organ loft and in a soprano voice of some power sang George B. Nevin's "Ave Maria". There was another round of applause when she had finished. A moment later Neville
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himself appeared in the doorway of the vestry and walked out to his place behind the lectern. He was considerably younger than I had expected, and definitely handsomer. He is a man of not much over thirty, tall, slender, and dark, with black hair and a long, slightly Latin face that inevitably, a dozen years ago, would have resulted in his being called the "Valentino type." He wore a well-cut brown tweed suit, a blue shirt, and a black-and-red striped tie, and he stood for a half minute or so smiling at us until the applause that greeted him had subsided. When he started to talk, I had some difficulty following him. For one thing, he had the old oratorical trick of keeping his voice low until he had the full attention of his audience. In addition, his dissertation was somewhat elliptical, and it was some time before I was able to keep track of his thought as he jumped, seemingly at random, from one subject to another. He began by speaking of the Bible. "Don't misunderstand me," he said at one point. "I love the Bible. I know that a good many people, maybe some of you here before me, may think it is dull and uninteresting. I don't feel that way about it. I enjoy it. If I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't read it. I have told you many times we are not here to suffer, we are here to enjoy life, to take joy in the very act of being, and if I didn't really like the Bible I should never waste time on it. I do, though, and if you would approach it in the way I do I am sure you'd enjoy it too. For the Bible is not history. Forget about that What the Bible is is a great psychological drama, perhaps the greatest that has ever been written, and ?nee you get that fact well in mind, a good many of the things in it that seem obscure and complex will be simple. God, for instance." He was speaking more rapidly now, with quick, free gestures, and a certain urgency had crept into his tone; he seemed hardly to pause at all to draw breath. There was something engaging about his manner. It was the urgency of a youth trying desperately to explain a point that he himself is sure of but that he's sure his hearers won't understand unless he's a bit vehement about it. "What is God?" he went on. "He is man, he's the mind, he's the mood. And the apostles, they were not mere men, and it would be wrong of us to suppose so. They are the psychological attributes of man, his fears, his passions, his desires. And that house we hear spoken of—'In my father's house there are many mansions'—what is that but
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the mind of man itself, or the head, where the brain is housed? Do you see how simple it can become, once the right approach is taken?" I was beginning to sort out individuals in the congregation around me. In the pew in front of mine, two women of about forty-five were sitting, one of them thin and angular, with a look of what seemed to be permanent discontent on her face, the other short, plump, and unemotional. Both were listening with the closest attention. In another pew were two girls with elaborate hairdos, who reminded me of restaurant hostesses. In still another was an elderly man with a deeply lined face, small, sly eyes, and a huge, beaked nose. He was sitting in his shirt sleeves, with his coat folded carefully on his lap, and he kept nodding his head and smiling gently, as if he had heard all this before and derived a certain reminiscent pleasure from its repetition. Neville paused, pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket, passed it swiftly over his brow, and went on. "Or tongues," he said." 'They spoke in many tongues.' We find that reference in the Bible. And if we speak of tongues, there must be a reference to the languages that the tongues are speaking. Many tongues, many languages, and then how shall we find the real language, the language of meaning and the meaning that the language represents in a word, the mood? "I can explain it best to you by an example," Neville continued, and he described a woman who wants to be married and who imagines herself in the wedding gown, all ready for the ceremony. "Will she not then he nearer to the fulfillment than if she had just said, 'Oh, the whole thing is impossible! It can never be'? Or suppose that a man is in prison, and instead of saying to himself, 'Yes, I am the Jones that is in prison,' he says, 'No, I am not that Jones. I am another Jones, the one that is free.' He will have taken another mood, he will he speaking another language, and the mood and the language will be those of freedom. And if he achieves the right mood, if he finds the hidden language, then he will he free. "He will he free," Neville repeated. Holding both edges of the lectern with his hands, he stared out at the audience. "For it is the mood that is the key," he went on, his voice rising slightly. "And I say to you now, if you can achieve one perfect mood, if you can construct one consummate desire, then the mood and desire shall be one and you shall be happy. For the mood is God,
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and God is the mood, and when you will have achieved that mood, then you will see the tongue of flame on your forehead. You will hear the thunder, or sometimes it may be more like a high, shrill whistling, so high that it seems unearthly. And as you see that flame, as you hear that sound, you will slip"—he emphasized the word by a snap of his fingers—"you will slip into that deep which is your real being. And while you are there, then your mood will become real and your desire will be granted to you, and become real and actual to you too." I gathered that Neville's theory is that if you wish hard enough on anything, and then fall asleep or fall into a trance while wishing, your wish will be granted, at least for as long as you're asleep. He went on to declare that if the practice is carried on long enough, and in the proper manner, the dream merges with actuality and you really are, or have, what you wanted to be or wanted to acquire. At the time, I was too surprised by the spectacle of a man in a brown tweed suit, in a church on West Forty-eighth Street, talking calmly about flames on the forehead and thunder, or whistling, in the ears to come to any conclusions about the validity of Neville's theory. No one else seemed to be surprised. The old man with the lined, smiling face was still gently nodding. The two women in the pew in front of me were leaning forward, more rapt than ever. Neville looked us over for a moment. "A withered arm can be straightened," he said. "A blind man can be made to see. Or if you are poor and want to be rich, if you are sick and want to be well, if you're tied to someone that you want to he rid of —I'm no moralist, and as I've told you many times in the course of these lectures, we are here to find joy in living and not to suffer— you can achieve all these things if the mood is approached in the proper way." A technique was required, he went on to explain. Many people, wanting to be rich, for instance, merely thought themselves rich and let it go at that. "You must do more than that. You must feel," he said. "You must feel yourself rich, feel the thrill of it, and the satisfaction." There were also, he said, certain misconceptions arising from
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the fact that sleep is part of the performance. "Many people, hearing that, think the best time to seek the silence is at night, when they're tired and likely to fall asleep anyway. They are wrong, and they will never get good results that way. This isn't like ordinary sleep. As I've told you before, it is a dropping off into the deep of your subconscious. It comes like that"-again the snap of the fingers—"and the right time to do it is when you're full of energy, not when you're tired and listless. Lie down then if you can, relax, look upward, and when you see the blue flame on your forehead you will know that the mood is upon you. It may last five seconds, ten seconds, ten minutes. It doesn't matter. But while it lasts the wish, will have begun to germinate and grow, and it will be hard for anything to rub it out later. Even now, in the midst of battle, a man can will himself away from the strife and the danger, and not be there. Or a friend with the power can do it for him. For while you sleep there is a Watcher, and that Watcher is omnipotent and omniscient, and no power, no armies of men, can stop the Watcher's gifts if the Watcher wills to give them." There was a discrepancy, I thought, between this reference to Divinity and Neville's earlier description of God as a mere embodiment of psychology. Neville let his voice drop suddenly to a conversational tone. "I should like to ask," he said, "if anyone here has achieved the mood since our last meeting." There was a pause, and then two hands went up. One belonged to a woman some distance from where I was sitting. The other was the smiling old man's. Neville beamed, first on one and then on the other. "If you did it, you will surely get results," he said. He stood very still for an appreciable time, looking straight before him. Then he said, "Let us now go into the silence." He squared himself on his feet, shut his eyes, flung his head sharply back, and became immobile. Everyone in the audience but myself —every- one I could see, at any rate did much the same thing, and in a very few seconds the whole auditorium was so still that I could clearly hear the mild sounds of Sunday traffic (the car horns, the tire whirr, and the occasional voices of pedestrians) as it moved On the street outside. For at least two minutes, I found myself in the midst of perhaps two hundred people, all sitting with their heads thrown back and their eyes closed, silently courting the touch of a thin blue flame on their foreheads and the sound of a high, shrill whistle in
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their ears that would tell them that their inmost wishes were in process of being fulfilled. It was an odd sight, touching, saddening, grotesque, and a little laughable, all at once.
WHEN Neville finally opened his eyes, he glanced around and cleared his throat. There was a stir as his audience readjusted itself to the everyday world. "Yes," he said, "I really believe that the day will come when you and I will travel without the use of airplanes or trains or motor cars. We will simply put ourselves in the mood of being where we want to be, and be there, as this power we touch upon here becomes universal." He glanced at his wrist watch and smiled. "But it's nine o'clock, and it's warm, and I've been talking now for a long time. If there are any who want to go, then it will be perfectly all right for them to go now. Afterward, we will have a short question period." A man and a woman got up down in front and tiptoed self-consciously up the aisle. The rest of us stayed where we were, and after a fairly short silence a tall, elderly woman in a loose gray dress and a large black straw hat got up from a seat several rows in front of me. She spoke in an embarrassed, almost inaudible fashion, and it was hard for me to hear what she had to say. I gathered, though, that her difficulty had to do with voices. She heard voices while she was in the silence, and since Neville seemed never to have mentioned this phenomenon she wanted to know what its significance was. While he listened, Neville swabbed his face with his handkerchief. "No," he said when she had finished. "I don't think you really hear voices. What you hear is the thrill of having heard voices, and since all that is part of the mood you are striving to achieve it can hardly have any other significance." The next person to ask a question was a man. He, too, sat a few rows in front of me, and I couldn't see his face. He had a black suit and very black, close-cropped hair, and the back of his rather thin neck was so white as to seem almost tinged with blue. He was slightly stooped, and his build and his coloring somehow reminded me of a type one often sees along the streets of the city ; the faces of such men are usually pale, earnest, studious-looking, and a little worried. He wanted to know about disciplining the mind. It had occurred to him that since the success of achieving the mood depended so much on the proper control of the thoughts, it might
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be as well for the master to give some advice on it. Neville was a trifle abrupt in his answer, and it struck me that possibly he was eager to have the thing over and to get home for a shower. He said that he didn't believe any special disciplining of the mind was necessary to achieve the mood, or at least he knew of no sure method. "The discipline you need is within yourself, and it concerns your fears and thoughts and desires as much as your mind. The thing to do is to bring it out." He paused, and then threw in an extra bit of advice. "But above all, don't modify your objective. What I mean is, suppose you're a man who wants a better job and you set yourself to attain it by cultivating the mood. But suppose at the same time there are doubts in your mind. You're not sure you can handle the responsibilities of that job, you're not sure that you're well enough educated, and so on. Well, then, what you're really wishing is that you were smart enough, or well trained enough, to feel able to wish for the job. That's what I call modifying the objective, and it makes the mood all confused. It's the cause of a good many of our failures. Are there any more questions?" There were a few. A shirt-sleeved man with a long jaw and pale, protruding eyes got up to ask if Neville had read a book called "Christ in Flanders." Neville said no, he hadn't, and the man, his gambit declined, stood uncertainly for a moment and then sat down. A moment later the man in the black suit was up again. He asked embarrassedly if Neville minded his asking another question. "No, indeed," said Neville, pleasantly enough, and the man went on to say he was still deeply troubled by the matter of mental discipline. "What happens when I try to attain the mood," he said earnestly, "is that I just can't attain it. Instead of me controlling my thoughts, my thoughts control me. My mind wanders, or something." Neville said perhaps he should feel more. "Instead of concentrating so much on your thoughts," he continued, "try to feel, feel the thrill of having whatever it is you desire, and the joy of it, the great joy and the satisfaction. Then your thoughts will take care of themselves. They will follow your feelings and you'll have more success with the mood." He paused just for an instant. "Well," he said, with finality, "if there are no more questions, we'll consider this meeting ended." He announced the succeeding week's meetings, which would include a series of Bible climes, admission one dollar. There
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was a round of applause, which Neville acknowledged smilingly. Then he stepped down from the stand.
TWO ladies, one of them the woman who had been hearing voices, intercepted Neville on his way to the vestry, and he stopped to speak with them. I saw the man in the black suit, after a moment's hesitation, move down toward the group. The rest of us made our way slowly up the aisle to the street. It was still warm outside and the air seemed hazy; the street was dimmed out. Spilling onto the sidewalk, the congregation showed a tendency to just stand there, not talking, merely standing silently, as if taking their bearings in the darkness that surrounded them. As the church emptied, the crowd accumulated, until passers by coming up the street from Eighth Avenue had to worm their way through the mass before continuing freely toward Broadway. Then the drag of their passing took hold of us; in small clusters that trailed off into smaller ones, the crowd dispersed. Where the street crossed Broadway there were more lights and more movement, but it wasn't the movement of peacetime. For one thing, there were uniforms everywhere, and the uniforms gave a sense of impermanence. Meanwhile, our crowd was moving up the dark side street. Before long it melted into the throng on Broadway and lost its identity. Its small, private uncertainties were lost, too, in the larger uncertainties around it. I didn't see a single flame on any of the foreheads as they disappeared.
ROBERT M. COATES
