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New Era Community (1926) - 192:
192. The development of the power of observation will permit due attention to surrounding conditions. Anyone will understand that if the walls of your room were covered with an arsenic substance or with a preparation of sulphur, or of resin, or mercury, or musk, then such coverings would have an influence on the condition of the organism - this is a crude example. But now ask your biochemists and technologists what influence the material of dwellings has on the physical and psychic foundation. What is the difference between a house of brick and one of basalt, or between one of granite and one of marble, between an iron and a wooden one, between an oak and a pine one? To what kinds of organisms is an iron bed suitable and to what kinds a wooden one. Who needs a woolen carpet and who a wooden floor? About many conditions technology will be as uninformed as was the cave age. And yet, who would not agree that wood and minerals have an important medicinal significance? It means that essential analysis is at a standstill in the absence of observation. Investigation has gone along a channel of usualness, and for overzealous investigators somewhere a bonfire is already prepared. You may be sure that the spirit of the inquisition is still not very far away; the difference will be in the garb and in the means of eradicating new quests. New Era Community (1926) - 199:
199. It may be asked "How is it that in Your Community there is a place set aside for ancient structures and books? Why does not this antiquity have an influence on striving into the future?" There are two reasons first, the propelled consciousness does not look back; second, structures were created and objects gathered together only for the advancement into the future. The stratification of striving into the future fills the whole existence of the Community. The entire attraction of objects is drowned in the current of aspiration. Pillars of basalt do not evoke past events, but by their stability they affirm their fitness for the future. The books do not carry thought back into the past but bear testimony just for the future. Transference of the whole consciousness into the future can affirm the existence of the Community. I shall not tire of repeating that community must be accepted by the consciousness. No external assurances serve to convince Us. Indispensable is that quality of the consciousness which sleeping or waking speaks the same; for any other solution is inadmissible even in the form of a jest.
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