My young warriors,
In a few minutes you will enter into the Place of Honor where, one by one, you will learn whether or not you are fitted to swear the oath which will bind you to the Imperial Stormtroooper Force forever.
For five years you have been preparing for this moment. You have mastered the techniques of PolWar and Intersystem Relations, of translite navigation and combat, as well as a host of subjects too numerous to mention. Your studies have encompassed every area of knowledge and have provided you with the most advanced preparation available to any being in the known galaxy. Though you were carefully selected for this training, many who began with you are not here today.
In the process of your training here, you have sharpened to a keen edge certain qualities:
unusual powers of observation and memory; a degree of patience and persistence unknown among the masses of men; and, above all, the ability to clear each problem given you of its accidental elements - to arrive quickly at its essentials. Here you have also learned courage and honor, for these are the marks of all true warriors.
Yet for all this you may only have become excellent warriors, a credit to the Stormtrooper force, but NOT graduates of this academy; for there is more that you must know. You must know how you will be Mind Warriors.
What have eyou learned of the Universe you will soon be roaming freely?
That it is a million-billion parts? That it stands against itself? That it sleeps and wakens and dies? I tell you to learn this: It is ONE.
Have you remembered your yesterdays and dreamed your tomorrows? Thought and wearied of thought? Admired and despised? You have been mistaken: They are ONE.
The Oneness of the Universe is found in your KNOWING of it and in the corners of your mind where knowing is most at home. Knowing and the Known are ONE, indivisible, inalienable. The true knower labors not but lets the known become him.
What is a god? It is only a shadowy image in our dreams of what we might be if we knew the Universe. Let me teach you that you WILL be gods if only you will labor not against the Universe but will know it as it is to be known.
How may you do this? Dismiss from your memories the fear of death, for it stands in your way. The living is in the dead and the dead is in the living, and they are ONE. The Universe does not notice a distinction between life and death, but is forever changing its colors and textures to become another and to seem fixed and inviolate. You shall see in number what the Universe is not. And what is in a number but the fear of death.
Dismiss also from your imagination any lingering hope that you may resist the pulsing life and death and Oneness which is the Universe. The ages are filled with the howling ghosts of the fools who have tried. Were your resistance to succeed, what would be the result? You would obliterate your own being, as it is one with ONE. For you are ONE, and at ONE, and of ONE. But your resistance will not succeed.
And how shall this teaching change you? How may this final instruction make you a Mind Warrior?
It will give you eyes to see the weakness of your enemy, for he cannot distinguish the essential from the accidental. He must depend upon his own Will; that is to say, he must depend upon his vacant hope to be what he may not be. This hope, I teach you, rests in the heart of your enemies. They despise you because you have no hope; but you will be victorious over them, and they shall be defeated. You will know them, and you will know your time. You will know yourselves and when your time is not. You will be alone and they will be in hosts but you will KNOW and they will not KNOW. They will be feverish and will think of their fever as a virtue, but you will be cold and will KNOW.
They will hate you, but you will hate not, for you will KNOW. They will pray to pull you down; but you will not pray,and you will not be pulled down.
You will look down into the minds of your enemies and you will find there the hope which they have lodged there. You will measure their hope against their power. They will have power, for their hope is but a part, and they are ONE also. But their power will avail them not, for you will not attack their power, which is ONE; but you will attack their hope, which is not ONE. In this you will defeat them by knowing them and by knowing their wills and by making the error which is their wills cause their defeat. And you shall know their errors even before they may be committed, because you will know how they are not at one with ONE.
I teach you that it is ONE, and that the ONE is a thought, and that you are thinking that thought. Henceforth you may not see as other men see, nor hear as they hear, if you are thinking the thought that it is ONE. You must be a riddle to men and a danger, but you may not be of them any longer.
And whom do you serve? We are warriors of the Empire, for it is the time of the Empire and not another time yet to be. And the Empire is making the Universe ONE in its way, for it is time to make the Universe ONE. You will, therefore, serve the Empire.
Now you will each proceed alone into the Place of Honor. As you pass within, you will find two doors. On each door you will see a sigil, unbeknownst to you. Behind one door is the Oath Scroll and the Trapezoidal altar. Behind the other, the Universe in which you once lived. He who selects the latter door may never return to this Hall.
In the sigil on the first door is the KNOWLEDGE OF THE ONE which leads to the path of MindWar. It is the sign of overgoing and bridging and seeing. In the other sign, however, there is hope. If you have understood these final instructions which I have spoken, you will sleect the first door because you will recognize the sign. If you have not understood, you will select the 2nd door because you will be drawn to its sigil. When you have opened one door the other will be forever sealed to you, so choose well; but choose as you will choose.
Those who sign the Oath Scroll will dine tonight in the Great Hall and will learn of the company there. Pass through, if you may, for I have completed these instructions.
-General Terclis/Colonel Richard L. Sutter, U.S. Army
excerpted from `The Dark Side`, by Michael Aquino
for access to full text, go here:
http://www.xeper.org/maquino
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