B506 <=> B508 [BTG XXX Art, p. 507]

“Although indeed these contemporary theaters with all that proceeds in them happen to be in this way – but of course only ‘for today’ – an excellent means for the better sleep of your favorites, nevertheless the objectively evil consequences of these theaters for beings, and particularly for the rising generation, are incalculable.

“The chief harm for them from these theaters is that they are an additional factor for the complete destruction in them of all possibilities of ever possessing the need, proper to the three-brained beings, called the ‘need-for-real-perceptions.’

“They have become such a maleficent factor chiefly owing to the following:

“When they go to their theaters and, sitting quietly, look on at every kind of varied many-sided, even though senseless, ‘manipulations’ and manifestations of their contemporary actors, then although they are in their usual waking state, yet every kind of association, both ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ proceeds in them exactly as they proceed during their complete passivity or sleep.

“Namely, when they receive a large number of accidentally corresponding shocks for stimulating the shocks already fixed, and previously perceived and automatized in a series of impressions, and when they reflex these with the functioning of what are called ‘organs-of-digestion-and-sex,’ then, in consequence, obstacles arise in their presences for the proceeding even of those pitiable conscious being-associations which have already somehow become automatized to produce in them a more or less correct tempo for the transformation of the substances required for that passive existence of theirs, during which there must be transformed substances required for their active existence.