B1232 <=> B1234 [BTG XLVIII From the Author, p. 1233]

Summing up all that has been said, the thoughts set out in the lecture you have heard read, as well as what I have added today, that is about the two categories of contemporary people who in respect of inner content have nothing in common, and about that grievous fact which has been made clear to a certain degree thanks to the addition I have made, namely, that in the common presences of people in recent times, thanks to progressively deteriorating conditions of ordinary life established by us – particularly owing to the wrong system of education of the rising generation – the various consequences of the organ Kundabuffer have begun to arise much more intensely, I consider it necessary to say and even to emphasize still more that all misunderstandings without exception arising in the process of our collective life, particularly in the sense of reciprocal relationship, and all disagreements, disputes, settling-ups and hasty decisions – just these decisions, after the actualization of which, in practice, there arises in us the lingering process of “Remorse-of-Conscience” – and even such great events as wars, civil wars, and other similar misfortunes of a general character proceed simply on account of a property in the common presences of ordinary people who have never specially worked on themselves, which property I this time would call “the-reflecting-of-reality-in-one’s-attention-upside-down.”

Every man, if he can even a little seriously think, so to say “without being identified” with his passions, must agree with this if he takes into account merely one single fact often repeated in the process of our inner life, namely, that all our experiencings which at first, just at the moment they are still proceeding in us, seem to be stark terrors, appear, after the lapse of only an insignificant time and when these experiencings have been replaced by others and are recalled by chance, and when according to our logical reasoning we are already in another mood, not worth, as is said, “a brass farthing.”