The Principle of Reincarnation
The article: Unnatural Fatigue
Chapter 8
The heavy burden of self-pity or "martyrdom"
But carrying a savage and its unwritten laws in one's heart and brain in this way, and letting it have a say in determining one's behaviour is a burden that the modern human being of the twentieth century cannot carry without mentally and volitionally overstraining itself.
This burden literally causes this being's unnatural fatigue.
It often drags itself to death under this burden.
Because of the previously mentioned greatly expanded ability to think, which it acquired as the result of another state of being in its mind and heart, this savage nature inherited from the past can cause it to reflect excessively.
This reflection constitutes all the kinds of thoughts that find vent in anger, hatred and the tendency to persecute people that one believes are one's evil genius or the cause of one's misfortune.
This reflection, because of primordial human instincts and modern intelligence, makes the human being assert to himself and others his innocence and purity in any conflict with his neighbour.
And when the reflection has succeeded, so that its originator has completely hypnotised itself into seeing pure innocence in its own being, then the destruction of its own abilities begins in earnest.
It now becomes not merely more embittered by the object of its anger, which greatly increases its nervous tension, but it also becomes depressed owing to it now being able to see the entire situation, because of autosuggestion, as nothing but martyrdom.
It thereby comes to suffer from excessive self-pity.
Bitterness and anger towards another human being and feeling sorry for itself have now become two great spheres of activity in its daily life, which to a greater or lesser extent occupy its thoughts.
Such a human being prevents itself from being happy since its imagined martyrdom prevents it from being mentally normal and in balance.