B1222 <=> B1224 (BTG XLVIII From the Author, p. 1223)

As, for instance, suppose that the solution of the question of our inability really to sense various possible genuine terrors, in particular the terror of one’s own death, should become, so to say, a “burning question of the day” – which occurs with certain questions in the contemporary life of people – then in all probability all contemporary people, ordinary mortals as well as those called the “learned,” would categorically offer a solution, which they would not doubt for a moment and, as is said, spluttering at the mouth, would set about to prove that what in fact saves people from being able to experience such terrors is just their own “will.”

But if this is admitted, then why does not this same presumed will protect us from all the little fears we experience at every step?

In order to sense and understand with your whole being what I am now saying, and not merely to understand with that so to say “mind-fornication” of yours, which to the misfortune of our descendants has become the dominant inherency of contemporary people, picture to yourself now merely the following.

Today, after the lecture, you return home, undress, and get into bed, but just as you are covering yourself with your blanket a mouse jumps out from under the pillow and scuttling across your body ducks into the folds of the blanket.

Admit candidly, does not a shiver actually already run through the whole of your body merely at the bare thought of such a possibility?

Is it not so?

Now please try to make an exception and without the participation of any of that, so to say, “subjective emotionalness,” whatsoever, which has become fixed in you, think with your mentation alone about such a possible occurrence to you, and you yourself will then be amazed that you react to this in this way.