B874 <=> B876 (BTG XLI The bokharian dervish, p. 875)

“When I had made all this clear to myself, I was much astonished and became very interested to know how this had come about, because I already very well knew that this knowledge had already long before ceased to exist in the Reason of the three-brained beings of the Earth and that this venerable Hadji could scarcely have heard of it often and thus have had an interest, as happens among them, gradually formed in him.

“And indeed, my boy, it has already long ago become proper there to the three-brained beings who have taken your fancy to become interested only in what they often see or often hear about, and whenever they do become interested in something, then this interest of theirs stifles all other being-necessities in them, and it will always seem obvious to them that what interests them at the given moment is just the very thing that ‘makes the world go round.’

“When the relations necessary in such a situation had been established between this sympathetic dervish Hadji-Asvatz-Troov and myself, that is to say, when he had already begun to talk with me more or less normally without the so to say ‘mask’ which it has already become fully proper to contemporary beings to wear in their relations with other beings like themselves, especially when they meet these others for the first time – then, when these necessary relations had been established between us, I asked him, of course in the corresponding approved manner, why and how he had become interested in this branch of true knowledge.

“Here you might as well know that in general there on the surface of your planet on each separate part, during the process of the ordinary being-existence of these strange three-brained beings, their own special forms of external relationship with each other have gradually been formed and have passed from generation to generation.