B1207 <=> B1209 [BTG XLVIII From the Author, p. 1208]

“A man comes into the world like a clean sheet of paper, which immediately all around him begin vying with each other to dirty and fill up with education, morality, the information we call knowledge, and with all kinds of feelings of duty, honor, conscience, and so on and so forth.

“And each and all claim immutability and infallibility for the methods they employ for grafting these branches on to the main trunk, called man’s personality.

“The sheet of paper gradually becomes dirty, and the dirtier it becomes, that is to say, the more a man is stuffed with ephemeral information and those notions of duty, honor, and so on which are dinned into him or suggested to him by others, the ‘cleverer’ and worthier is he considered by those around him.

“And seeing that people look upon his ‘dirt’ as a merit, he himself inevitably comes to regard this same dirtied sheet of paper in the same light.

“And so you have a model of what we call a man, to which frequently are added such words as ‘talent’ and ‘genius.’

“And the temper of our ‘talent’ when it wakes up in the morning, is spoiled for the whole day if it does not find its slippers beside the bed.

“The ordinary man is not free in his manifestations, in his life, in his moods.

“He cannot be what he would like to be; and what he considers himself to be, his is not that.

“Man – how mighty it sounds! The very name ‘man’ means ‘the acme of Creation’; but . . . how does his title fit contemporary man?

“At the same time, man should indeed be the acme of Creation, since he is formed with and has in himself all the possibilities for acquiring all the data exactly similar to the data in the actualizer of everything existing in the Whole of the Universe.”