Beelzebubs-Tales-to-His-Grandson-by-G-I-Gurdjieff

in this Even if, for reasons not depending on them, these unfortunate threebrainedbeings who breed on the planet Earth do not have the possibilityduring their responsible existence of acquiring divine Objective Reason, whyis it, since they arose so long ago and their species has survived for so manycenturies, that those customs and 'instinctive automatic habits' proper to allbeings could not gradually have been formed by now in their presence thanksto the flow of time alone, even in the abnormal conditions of their ordinaryexistence—which existence, in both the 'egoistically personal' and the'collective' sense, might then flow more or less tolerably from the point ofview of objective reality?"Having said this, our poor Hassein looked inquiringly at the cause of thecause of his arising.To this question of his favorite grandson, Beelzebub replied as follows:"Well, to be sure . . . my dear boy. In the course of long centuries manycustoms and what are called 'moral habits,' often very good and useful fortheir ordinary existence, were gradually established among your favorites ofthe planet Earth, as on all planets where beings arise who spend part of theirexistence simply in ordinary processes But herein lies the evil, that thesehappy achievements of being-welfare, which become fixed in the process ofordinary existence from the flow of time alone, and which improve throughtransmission from generation to generation, sooner or later disappear entirelyor are so modified that they are automatically transformed into 'unhappy'ones, thus increasing the number of those small harmful factors that taken asa whole 'dilute' more and more each year both the psyche and the veryessence of your favorites."Of course, if at least any of these good customs and already automatizedmoral habits, fixed by time in the process of their existence, could havesurvived and passed by