There in that room, which was only missing a HOME SWEET HOME sign to make the farce complete, my soul was stewing on the flames of my own hell, being deceived by the average temperature of 63 °F, and by statistics in general. Until the day when I met Kowalsky and became enthralled with Bicyclism. Listening for several days to his stories about the secret order, about his magnificent exploits, I realized that my entire previous life had been a series of absolute mistakes. I felt unworthy to ask if I could become a member of the Little Brothers of the Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross. To my misfortune, I was quickly released from jail and told to pay a fine. I went home, paid the fine, made up with my mother and almost forgot about Kowalsky. Two years later, I got a letter from India. Wondering who could be writing me from that distance, I turned the envelope over and saw “from: Kowalsky.”
Here are the contents of that letter:
Dharamsala
21 December 1953
Dear Doctor Çulabi,
No doubt you are surprised that I am writing to you even though we did not exchange addresses, but I am also sure that you will not be angry. Two years ago, when I had the honor of sharing a jail cell with you, I spoke of the Little Brothers of the Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross. I still remember the interest you showed in my, probably lengthy, explanation. I am also convinced that you yourself wished to belong to the brotherhood, but that you did not dare to ask. However, I must tell you that you were already, at that time, most certainly a member of the Evangelical Bicyclists. Unconscious of it, of course. But the best and most edifying things are done unconsciously. Even the members of the trifling sects of psychoanalysts talk about that.
But now I will move on to the explanation that I owe you. This is how it is possible to belong to the brotherhood and not be conscious of it for years. The dead members of our ancient and honorable Order do not cease their activities after death. To the contrary, it could be said that the real activity of all Bicyclists of the Rose Cross actually begins then, but such a definition is meaningless. Wrenched from the course of time, they see a certain part of the past and a corresponding part of the future as integral. Maintaining the legend, our dead fathers know all members of the Little Brothers, not only those who were and are, but also those who will later be. Consequently, a Grand Master of the order knew about you long before I did, and I was assigned to be your mentor long, long before we met in that charming cell.
Before I induct you into the secrets of the Order, a warning must be given: it is neither easy nor simple to be an Evangelical Bicyclist. You must be prepared to do anything. And above all — to believe in everything.
It is customary that the mentor tells the newly-accepted member something about his life. The purpose of that act is initiation, because mentor and candidate are connected in a mystical way. Regardless of whether they ever meet or of how great the distance is between them, their lives are connected and they somehow complete each other, making up a coherent whole, and therefore the number of members of the Evangelical Bicyclists is always an even one. The day when one of the members dies, the mentor begins to compose the text for the initiation. However, the text is sent on the day of birth of the dead member. Your predecessor in the Order, whose secret name was Steely, was born on December 21, and that is why the letter was sent to you on that date. Since letters from Dharamsala travel exactly 40 days to their destinations, you are becoming aware that you are one of the Bicyclists at the same moment when (after the post mortem purification, the length of which is calculated with the formula: date of death + time from date of death to date of birth + 40 days) your predecessor is becoming aware that he has overcome death, passed the Second Initiation and taken his place in the eternal hierarchy. In this way, the consciousness of the individual, and indeed of the entire Order, is constantly increasing through carefully coordinated this-worldly and other-worldly events. In that way the Great Secret is carefully hidden from the profane, simultaneously revealing itself ever more to the consecrated. This goes so far that even people of remarkable spirituality, but who are skeptics at heart, consider the very existence of the order to be a rather bad joke.
So much for now. Remember the words of St. Paul, “I have fed you with milk and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it.” My confession follows. You should keep in mind that it is not true, because in this world nothing is true any more. Once long ago, the Truth revealed itself, but few were those who believed it. That is why the world is punished by believing in the greatest lies.
In my youth, my dear friend, I was this way and that, much more evil than good. But that is no longer important. The dead brothers have erased my past. I will tell you about my gradual conversion. After many years of studying poetry and literature, after a period in which I was a nihilist and revolutionary, overnight I changed my convictions and became a royalist. You might ask: What kind of belief is that anyway, to be a nihilist? The answer is: the most edifying. To consider the world and yourself in it as null and void, that is worthy of the most edified spirits. However, the years got to me: I became something of a conformist, it was harder and harder for me to put up with the extremeness of nihilism and the unity of the revolutionaries to whom I belonged. If anything could make me angry (I am using the past tense, because nothing can make me angry any longer) it was unity and unanimity. And yet, the fact that I was a subject of a country ruled by a king gave my convictions a certain dose of bizarreness, necessary for me to be able to live at all. At that time, you see, it was not fashionable to be a royalist. My comrades at the time, I must mention this, despised me, but I could already see then that the envy of the rich was concealed behind their concern about the welfare of people, and I already knew then that, once they had triumphed, they would become the same as the objects of their hatred. Because, like takes displeasure in like. In my dreams, I always saw a terrible multitude of people, raising their hands and repeating nonsense like a choir.
That dream soon became a reality, but I remained a royalist. I was not led astray by fashion. I justified it like this: if the Lord had wanted to create a multitude, he would have made many people, not just one as he did, and that one — quite human from the outset — messed it all up. If things really are like that, I thought, then one should be disunified and in disaccord at all costs.
The second, quite important, element for my conversion was the heraldry. Probably because of my humble background, I had always felt veneration toward the coats-of-arms of the royal and noble families; all those lions and eagles excited me to tears with their radiant grandeur. Yes, I know, not everything was noble in the good old days, but things were visually better shaped and much less naïve than the red pieces of linen that my former comrades used to hang on the façades of buildings immediately after winning, where it would say that everything is excellent and that it will be even better. To make matters worse, the masses believed that everything really was excellent and that it would be even better. (The power of the written word is enormous and that is why they control it so carefully.) Actually I was offended by the childishness of the attempt to convince me (or anyone else) that I came from an ape, that I am now a man, and that I should be happy because of that. Above all, in this world the possibility does not exist, nor even the right, for someone to be happy, and everyone knows this but no one is willing to admit it. Because of cowardice, at that. That is why the kids in the schools have to learn commonplace lies instead of being taught about Nagarjuna’s metaphysics and the texts of St. Augustine.