The Self-calmer in Action
Beelzebub refers to self-calming as our inner ‘Evil-God.’ As with many things in The Tales self-calming is mentioned several times—being introduced on page 104 in the following way, when Beelzebub is discussing suggestibility. He says:
“Concerning all this it must be said that neither the organ Kundabuffer which their ancestors had is to blame, nor its consequences which, owing to a mistake on the part of certain Sacred Individuals, were crystallized in their ancestors and later began to pass by heredity from generation to generation.
“But they themselves were personally to blame for it, and just on account of the abnormal conditions of external ordinary being-existence which they themselves have gradually established and which have gradually formed in their common presence just what has now become their inner ‘Evil-God,’ called ‘Self-Calming.’
He later declares that our self-calming is what prevents us from making proper use of Remorse of Conscience when it arises. Beelzebub says:
“Consequently, in their presences there arise more and more frequently the causes for the manifestation of the said being-impulse of Remorse of Conscience. And as the sensations thereby induced, which are similar to those which arise from ‘being-Partkdolg-duty,’ infallibly lead to the suppression and the enslaving of the ‘denying-principle’ inherent in the common presences of the three-brained beings, called ‘self-calming’; then in them, during every kind of inner and outer manifestation of their common presences, which flow from the natural stimuli of one or another separately independently spiritualized localizations proper to be present in the three-centered beings, each time with the arising of this sensation of self-remorse, disagreeable to them, at first intentionally on the part of their ruminating parts, and later, thanks already to the habit which they had created, there began to be stifled and gradually to cease, ‘self-criticism.’ And so, by reason of this ‘impotency’ arising and always increasing in their organization, which involved, by constant repetition, the whole disharmony of all the functioning of their psyche, there gradually almost disappeared from their common presences such data also infallibly inherent in every three-brained being of all our Great Universe for manifesting sincerity even towards themselves.
So self-calming is what makes it difficult or impossible for us to be sincere with ourselves. (page 538). It is also what prevents us from taking advantage of Solioonensius, those times when the stars make it more possible to work on ourselves. Beelzebub says (page 624):
“But later, among the number of chief evils which flow from the conditions of ordinary being-existence established by them themselves, specially when in the presences of every terrestrial three-brained being, there began to become predominant the ‘evil-inner-God’ of theirs I mentioned, named there self-calming, then it occurred that in them under the influence of the action of Solioonensius, instead of the desire and striving for a speedier self-perfection a something began to arise such as they themselves characterize by the words ‘need of freedom,’ which chiefly serves the cause of the arising there of these same grievous processes of theirs similar to this last ‘Bolshevism.’
When you study The Tales you discover that Beelzebub describes our failings either as the results of our own (or our ancestors’) misguided behavior or as the consequences of the properties of the cursed organ Kundabuffer. It seems that our fault are divided almost evenly between these two.