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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. Infinity - Book 2 (1930) - 491:
491. The regeneration of the spirit is achieved through striving, not through the monotony in skills which beclouds one's mind. Evenness is usualness; evenness is numbness; evenness is death of spirit. Only when the spirit understands its line of action can it set itself into the orbit of the cosmic course. Hierarchy (1931) - 177:
177. Learn not to count days and not to notice years, because there is no difference when you are in the great expanse of Service. One should learn to feel oneself beyond trivial usualness and to adhere in spirit to the manifested world of Beauty. Let us proceed together to where there are no boundaries or end, where one can transform each beneficent gleam into the radiation of a rainbow of blessings to the worlds. Hierarchy (1931) - 222:
222. Unusualness is a happy quality of each decision. Let us take the instance of an illness. The physician may give his best diagnoses and all his medicines, but this usual way may not lead to improvement. But a Yogi gives advice, and this unusual decision creates a strengthening condition. The medicine of a Yogi is not from an apothecary and avoids narcotics, but it contains the secretions of glands which, like food, strengthen the substance of the nerves. The same property is possessed by the secretions of trees, the resins of which can carry through the pores of the skin the same fortification for the nearest nerves. Certainly, purified resin can be taken internally. The best purification will be through the solar ray, but this requires a long time, because the process of sedimentation is very slow. Each oil may be purified just as slowly, but this purification is not to be compared with any chemical process. Thus the unusualness of the Yogi's advice has an advantage over the usualness of that of physicians. Thus act. Fiery World - Book 3 (1935) - 340:
340. The consciousness of humanity has become so saturated with the dust of usualness that it is necessary to break through this wall. A single kindling of a consciousness is ineffectual before that terror which darkens the consciousness. A completely fallen consciousness can arise more quickly than that one which hides itself under various manlike masks. Take a consciousness imbued with self-conceit and with its own great importance in the world structure; when this consciousness destroys the construction of Good, it is hopeless. It is important to know about such a consciousness on the path to the Fiery World.
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