Grand Master to the Brothers!
I would like to announce that Dharamsala is a city in India of some 40,000 inhabitants. All day long, they do nothing except sit in the shade of mango groves crying out till they are exhausted: OM MANE PADME HUM, in the expectation that they will be enlightened. Of the other points of interest, I should mention the herds of holy cows that are different from regular cows because they have haloes.
In the whole city there are only three bicycles, rusty, neglected, and falling apart.
Where the cows are saints, the bicycles rust. He who has ears, let him hear.
The abovementioned Herbert Meier cites that very document, the most tangible one, about the Little Brothers as evidence that the order is a fabrication, a mystification created by idle souls. According to him, the text lacks spirituality of any kind. In the polemic which appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, D. H. Grainger opposed Meier, comparing the Basel Parchment to the lessons of a teacher of Zen. “Taken from the context of the spirituality of a closed community,” Grainger writes, “a sentence, or even a paragraph cannot be expected to make sense outside the group of followers. Even the Bible, whose myths are deeply entrenched in the collective unconscious, seems like a heap of nonsense and hallucinations to the untrained eye.” Further in the text, Grainger relates the negligence of the Bicyclists to their deeply implanted feeling of belonging to the eternal. “One who truly looks into eternity,” the author says, “does not care about the ephemerality of things and books. It is logical to connect the iconoclasm of the Evangelical Bicyclists with their scorn of manmade objects. One might say: they consciously abhor books about the holy, so that the books will not conceal the holy.”
However, as far as it is known, the Little Brothers do not hide their manuscripts, projects and actions in the least, citing Christ’s words from the apocryphal Gospel according to Thomas: “If you take out what is within you, what you have taken out will save you. If you do not take out what is within you, what you have not taken out will destroy you.” Due to the completely public nature of their actions, the Evangelical Bicyclists are protected by the greatest possible secrecy. If we examine that claim a little more carefully, we will see that it is not lacking in logic whatsoever: an object of interest is generally one that is hidden, while easily available things go unnoticed; the more obvious a thing is, the more mysterious it is. Even the Creator himself, who is the most real and most present, is he not also the most invisible and the most unapproachable?
In the real world, the Little Brothers do not own any kind of building, they do not have gatherings or significant initiations or rituals. According to some sources, they meet in a safe place, far from the noise and curious onlookers — in their dreams. It is worthwhile to mention that J. W. Kowalsky, who is thought to have been a Grand Master or at least an important member of the order, in the period between 1930 and 1936, maintained intensive correspondence with Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. One of J. Kowalsky’s letters addressed to Freud was published in the journal Psychoanalysis Today (8, 1959):
Dear Herr Doctor Freud,
The remarks on dreams that you presented in your letter are undoubtedly of great importance for the further explication of that phenomenon, otherwise neglected by scholarship. The fact that dreaming directly anticipates the future (the case of the alarm clock)
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not only indicates its nature in protecting the dreamer from waking, but also shows that we need to reflect most seriously about all our fundamental knowledge of time and space.
Even though you reproach me for being a “poet,” even though I am interested in matters of scholarship, I am prepared to withstand such reprimands. I would dare to claim: not only are dreams a territory full of the symbols of the libido, they are much more than that. I would say: they are the frontier between our world and otherworldliness, or whatever you would like to call it, where completely different laws apply than these that we are accustomed to, perhaps by force.
The misfortune lies in the fact that we are too highly oriented to events in reality. Not only are dreams not taken seriously, they are even thought to be nonsense. Your contribution to a different view of this matter will be highly valued by history, I am convinced. I would like to offer you a rather daring supposition: as you know, the process of the maturation of the human being is closely connected with upbringing and education; we teach our children the secrets and rules of life. We do not do anything like that with dreams. We dream, if I may say it that way, chaotically, randomly. Perhaps that is why we live that way — chaotically and randomly. I am convinced that self-discipline, so necessary for success in waking life, would render excellent results in our dreams as well. If, one day, we were to take control of ourselves in our dreams, instead of surrendering ourselves to sad fantasies, undoubtedly we would discover a lot about our own past, and also about the past of the species to which we belong.
I anxiously await your reply and humbly ask that you receive my deepest regards.
Unfortunately, it is not known if Freud answered Kowalsky. Anyway, that is not the purpose of our study. The letter was quoted to support the thesis about the activities of the Evangelical Bicyclists in dreams. D. H. Grainger, with whom other authors agree, proposes that, as time has passed, generation after generation of the members of the brotherhood have perfected the skill of dreaming; controlling the “sad fantasies” that Kowalsky mentions in his letter to Freud, they have obtained the ability to meet each other in their dreams, regardless of the spatial or temporal distance, and in doing so they avoid all the limitations imposed by time and space. The church of the Holy Spirit is also mentioned, an enormous hovering cathedral which, being dreamt of for hundreds of years, has become an oneiric entity. In other words: it is not dreamt by anyone as they like it, but whenever it appears in a dream, everyone sees the same church whose beauty exceeds all description. Whoever reaches that region of dreams finds a vision that takes their breath away. It is also dreamt by those who do not belong to the Order. One such dream was recorded by Julie Mass in the book The Sacred Symbols of Dreams (Princeton University Press, 1961)
(…) The patient insists that several times he dreamt the following: “I find myself in a wide field that I have reached after a nightmare. I look up and see a large cathedral hovering in the sky. It is completely translucent, although I would not say that it is made of glass or of any other material… I can see that, inside it, a cross is also hovering. Inside there is a multitude of people. When I try to draw near it, everything fades away and I wake up.”
The interpretation of the dream that follows the quote is not significant for us. Grainger claims that he has come across several identical descriptions of the church of the Holy Spirit among dreamers who have never even heard of the order of the Little Brothers, and who do not even have esoteric inclinations. In the text “Endless Bicyclism,” still unpublished, the same author writes:
“As soon as they fall asleep, no matter where they are, the Bicyclists of the Rose Cross go to the church. In the complete silence — far from time and the tumult — the dead, living and future members of the order gather there. The dead, who are in contact with the lowest hierarchy of angels, counsel the living about how to act in history. While that is going on, the future members are learning their destinies by heart. The great influence of the Evangelical Bicyclists on events in the world which are, perhaps not without reason, are ascribed to the Little Brothers, is founded precisely on the cooperation of the brothers from all temporal categories. This also explains the strange indolence of the living members of the order. Not only is fanaticism foreign to them, they are almost completely uninterested and serve only as an incarnation, as a material point, an anchor of the order in space and time. However, the real activity of the Bicyclists takes place in the past and future. Taught by the dead brothers (who are in collusion with the heavenly hierarchy), the future members of the order prepare themselves to redirect the course of history toward Providence whenever the danger appears that history will turn in a direction determined by people. So, it is supposed that J. V. Dzh. — a member of the order prepared for the destiny of the clergy — was suddenly forced to take another position. Leaving the Seminary in Tbilisi, he infiltrated the orders of the revolutionaries and delivered the decisive blow to the idea of the thousand year Reich, even though, to make the paradox greater, he did not even know how to ride a bicycle.”