Svetislav Basara - The Cyclist Conspiracy

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 In the text “Endless Bicyclism,” still unpublished, the same author writes: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.”

II

In terms of the spiritual content of the document “Theology and Bicyclism,” it could approximately be reconstructed like this: The bicycle symbolizes the vertical. In the age of darkness, Kali Yuga, one should embark — the writer (or writers) of “Theology and Bicyclism” believe — on the road to salvation by bicycle. That is absurd, but because of that it is also salutary. Because “absurd” does not mean “impossible.” Theology renders a pile of useless knowledge; that knowledge can also be true, but it is unusable. That is exactly why theology and bicyclism should be combined. The advantages are obvious. Above all, the classical methods of salvation are no longer suitable for this era, which is so steeped in corruption that there are special institutions and services for inhibiting salvation.

No doubt, the Little Brothers are not far from the truth. The system of values of this world is tragically twisted. It is easy to suppose that Buddha would be arrested nowadays for begging, Jesus would be locked up in the madhouse because of his parables about the resurrection of the dead. Riding a bicycle, that is not conspicuous and this is very important. “Because,” as it is written in the ‘Theology,’ “the persecution of Christians goes on at full intensity, in spite of the commonplace rumors that it is a thing of the past. True, it is done more subtly and clandestinely, but also more efficiently.” That is why the Little Brothers , inconspicuously riding out of the cities on bicycles, turning the pedals till they are exhausted, attain mystical ecstasy, meditating on the symbol of the fish in which the name of the Savior is hidden — Ικϑuς.

The symbolism of the bicycle is interesting in itself. Seen from above , thus, from the viewpoint of the Holy Spirit, the bicycle looks like a cross to us:

The Evangelical Bicyclists, generally speaking, try to observe everything from above . Since that is impossible because of biological determinism, patient exercises in imagination are needed so that one can observe things from a birds-eye perspective, which significantly changes the meaning of events on the surface of the earth. A battle, for example, takes place according to the laws of iron logic for the participants and observers: we defend ourselves when we are attacked; we charge at a high point, because that will strengthen our position. Yet, if that same battle is watched from above, we just see a herd of fools moving about here and there, chaotically, shooting, killing and getting killed. The pinnacle of the Bicyclists’ meditation is to separate the soul from the body and observe oneself on a bicycle from a height of some three hundred feet, but rare are the brothers who have managed to do so.

Observed, on the other hand, horizontally, the bicycle is teeming with ancient symbols:

Its two wheels, two circles, symbolize two eternities: the rusty — front wheel — which turns meaninglessly and does not know that it is set in motion by the real eternity represented by the back, driving wheel. These two eternities are connected by the triangle of the frame that symbolizes the human conception of the Holy Trinity, because the true Holy Trinity is transcendental to the mind, like the bicyclist is to the bicycle. The large and small sprockets (connected by the chain, by the representation of the chain of cause-effect-cause) symbolize the unity of the macro- and micro-cosmos.

If we remove the wheels of the men’s bicycle, there is just the frame with its forks, and that is a graphic representation of the male soul: