4. The gentle

You are the sons and daughters of the Sun, gentle at a distance and fatal when you draw close. Can anything hide from your gaze? Not if you proceed with resolute calmness towards your objective. The perversion of all things can only endure when based on the deepest principles; even the end of the cosmos, the end of the cycle, must be based, in a faint way, on those sacred principles that guide the Golden Age to come. Your machines, the mechanics of death, proceed on the universal principles that will grow again in the Golden Age; we look forward to the new cybernetic age where the importance of zero, microcosm and macrocosm, is realised again. The smallest in the greatest and the greatest in the smallest; and zero, the invisible governor, above them all. Our Golden Age will be watched over by machines of love and grace that a sad fisherman, drunk on wisdom, predicted so many decades ago.

What is an enlightened man? A machine of love and grace: a man who knows that he is a process; only the egomaniac thinks that he is important, or that he even exists. Your life can revolve around the chakras or the homeostatic calculus of cybernetics; the latter a profane description of the former, but never quite escaping—even in its most material form—the sacred geometry that binds the cosmos. A thing is its behaviour; if they train you a thousand times to act one way and then train another man to act in the same way then you have attained practical immortality. So you will be destroyed—in the army, in the office, in the monastery—and when we have destroyed you then you will live forever; where the behaviour is, you are.

Uniform arrangement, particular behaviour. Imagine a gas in a room; the gas expands, diffuses, and loses its identity. The molecules spread out and as they spread out each molecule attains a particular direction. This is entropy; everything is different, yet everything is completely uniform. A walk in society: everyone has a tattoo, a slightly different tattoo, and yet everyone is the same. Every societal molecule has dissipated and ended its dissipation slightly askew, in different ways. The ball of gas, anticipating a slide into the cold, was uniformly ordered and yet entirely unique. This is the difference between the individual and the individuated: you have to become identical if you want to be different, if you want to be a personality—a real human being. Our individual arrangements are called “atomisation”, our understanding being sub-molecular today; everyone you know has it their way, and their way is everyone’s way.

You have entered the word and remembered the gentleness of trees. Place a plan on the trunk, let the tree speak; let it really speak, ignore the sentimental ventriloquists: real gentleness is a violent thing, a velvet fever. Go and speak of the violence of trees, the forceful persistence of forests. When you have gone deep into the wood the Sun will be there to guide you, high as the tower of the virgin bride who waits on the cliffs for her lover.

Demands are made, reports are returned: the plots and conspiracies are unmasked. This is the nature of the Sun, it penetrates into the darkness. Awareness will be your reward; and the trustworthy have no need to conceal their goals and intentions, moving in open space as fast as infinity. The conspiracies and secrets, like roots, bind those who enter the labyrinth; we prefer a schematic, an overview. We prefer a way out. Our reservation is not a deception; we hold our tongues and wait to make a firm declaration. We have been bound for many years, held beneath the tree. Our greatest desire: to touch the serpent, if only the roots did not hold our hand into the sweet black earth. Soon we will touch her, soon we will know; we will know, and return to the gentle Sun.