B354 <=> B356 [BTG XXVI “The-terror-of-the-situation,” p. 355]

“’A third forty days and nights I knelt on my knees and also neither ate nor drank, and every half-hour I plucked two hairs from my breast.

“’And only when, thereafter, I had finally attained complete freedom from all the bodily and spiritual associations of the impressions of ordinary life, I began to meditate how to be.

“’These meditations of my purified Reason then made it categorically clear to me, that to save the contemporary beings by any of the sacred ways was already too late.

“’These meditations of mine made it categorically clear to me, that all the genuine functions proper to man-being as they are, proper to all the three-centered beings of our Great Universe, had already degenerated in their remote ancestors into other functions, namely, into functions included among the properties of the organ Kundabuffer which were very similar to the genuine sacred being-functions of Faith, Love, and Hope.

“’And this degeneration occurred in all probability in consequence of the fact that when the organ Kundabuffer had been destroyed in these ancestors, and they had also acquired in themselves factors for the genuine sacred being-impulses then, as the taste of many of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer still remained in them, these properties of the organ Kundabuffer which resembled these three sacred impulses became gradually mixed with the latter, with the result that there were crystallized in their psyche the factors for the impulses Faith, Love, and Hope, which although similar to the genuine, were nevertheless somehow or other quite distinct.

“’The contemporary three-centered beings here do at times believe, love, and hope with their Reason as well as with their feelings; but how they believe, how they love, and how they hope – ah, it is exactly in this that all the peculiarity of these three being-properties lies!