Kundabuffer

“If you can’t explain it to
a six year old,
you don’t understand it yourself.”
~ Albert Einstein

“Even Jesus Christ himself and all the prophets sent from Above spoke of the death that can occur here in this life, that is to say, of the death of that "tyrant" from whom proceeds our slavery, and solely on the liberation from whom depends the first chief liberation of man…

Every man who can think even a little seriously, without being so to speak "identified" with his passions, must agree with this if he takes into account only one simple fact often repeated in the process of our inner life, namely, that all our experiences that seem so dreadful while we are going through them appear to our logical reasoning to be "not worth a red cent" after a lapse of only a short time, during which they have been replaced by other experiences and chance to be recalled when we are already in another mood.

The results of his thinking and feeling often lead the average man to make, as it might be expressed, "a fly out of an elephant and an elephant out of a fly." The manifestations of this harmful property in the common presence of people become particularly intense during such events as wars, revolutions, civil wars, and so on. At such times a state, recognizable even by them, is most acutely manifested, under the influence of which with rare exceptions they all fall, and which they call "mass psychosis."

The chief characteristic of this state is that when ordinary people with their already feeble mentation, which at such times becomes still feebler, receive shocks from the maleficent stories of some lunatic or other, they become in the full sense of the word victims of these malicious stories and manifest themselves completely automatically. While they are under the influence of this maleficent property, already permanently rooted in ordinary contemporary people, there ceases to exist in their common presence that sacred "something" called "conscience," whose acquisition was possible for them thanks to the data with which they were endowed by Great Nature, as godlike beings in contrast to mere animals.

Knowledgeable people sincerely regret this property in our contemporaries because, according to historical data as well as the discoveries of many genuine learned beings of past epochs, Great Nature no longer has any need for such a phenomenon as mass psychosis for maintaining her equilibrium. On the contrary, the periodic manifestation of this property in people compels her again and again to make new adaptations, for instance, increasing the birth rate, changing what is called the "tempo of the general psyche," and so on and so forth…

Proceeding from this and acting according to the wise saying of ancient times, which affirms that "in order to be a just and good altruist one must first of all be an out-and-out egoist," each one of us, making use of the common sense given us by Great Nature, must set as his chief aim to become a master. But not a master in the sense that this word conveys to contemporary people, namely, one who has many slaves and much money, usually handed down by inheritance, but in the sense of a man who, thanks to his objectively virtuous acts toward those around him—that is, acts manifested according to the dictates of his pure Reason alone, without the least participation of those impulses engendered in him as in all people by the consequences of the properties of that maleficent organ kundabuffer—acquires in himself that "something" which impels all those around him to bow before him and with reverence to carry out his orders…”

~ G.I.GURDJIEFF, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man