He feels bad: consequently he cannot overcome a care, a scruple, or an attitude of self-criticism.... He really fancies that his disagreeable condition is the result of his scruple, of his "sin," or of his "self-criticism."
But after profound exhaustion and prostration, a state of recovery sets in. "How is it possible that I can feel so free, so happy? It is a miracle; only a God could have effected this change."—Conclusion: "He has forgiven my sin." ...
From this follow certain practices: in order to provoke feelings of sinfulness and to prepare the way for crushed spirits it is necessary to induce a condition of morbidity and nervousness in the body. The methods of doing this are well known. Of course, nobody suspects the causal logic of the fact: the maceration of the flesh is interpreted religiously, it seems like an end in itself, whereas it is no more than a means of bringing about that morbid state of indigestion which is known as repentance (the "fixed idea" of sin, the hypnotising of the hen by-means of the chalk-line "sin").
The mishandling of the body prepares the ground for the required range of "guilty feelings"—that is to say, for that general state of pain which demands an explanation....
On the other hand, the method of "salvation" may also develop from the above: every dissipation of the feelings, whether prayers, movements, attitudes, or oaths, has been provoked, and exhaustion follows; very often it is acute, or it appears in the form of epilepsy. And behind this condition of deep somnolence there come signs of recovery—or, in religious parlance, "Salvation."
230.
Formerly, the conditions and results of physiological exhaustion were considered more important than healthy conditions and their results, and this was owing to the suddenness, fearfulness, and mysteriousness of the former. Men were terrified by themselves, and postulated the existence of a higher world. People have ascribed the origin of the idea of two worlds—one this side of the grave and the other beyond it—to sleep and dreams, to shadows, to night, and to the fear of Nature: but the symptoms of physiological exhaustion should, above all, have been considered.
Ancient religions have quite special methods of disciplining the pious into states of exhaustion, in which they must experience such things.... The idea was, that one entered into a new order of things, where everything ceases to be known.—The semblance of a higher power....
231.
Sleep is the result of every kind of exhaustion; exhaustion follows upon all excessive excitement....