In Search of the Miraculous

difficult for them, very difficult. It is much easier to sacrifice real things.

"Another thing that people must sacrifice is their suffering. It is very difficult also to sacrifice one's suffering. A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will

not give up his suffering. Man is made in such a way that he is never so much

attached to anything as he is to his suffering. And it is necessary to be free from

suffering. No one who is not free from suffering, who has not sacrificed his suffering,

can work. Later on a great deal must be said about suffering. Nothing can be attained

without suffering but at the same time one must begin by sacrificing suffering. Now,

decipher what this means."

I stayed in Moscow about a week and returned to St. Petersburg with a fresh store

of ideas and impressions. Here a very interesting occurrence took place which

explained many things to me in the system and in G.'s methods of instruction.

During the period of my stay in Moscow G.'s pupils had explained to me various

laws relating to man and the world; among others they showed me again the "table of

hydrogens," as we called it in St. Petersburg, but

in a considerably expanded form. Namely, besides the three scales of "hydrogens"

which G. had worked out for us before, they had taken the reduction further and had

made in all twelve scales. (See Table 4.)

In such a form the table was scarcely comprehensible. I was not able to convince

myself of the necessity of reduced scales.

"Let us take for instance the seventh scale," said P. "The Absolute here is 'hydrogen'

96. Fire can serve as an example of 'hydrogen' 96. Fire then is the Absolute for a piece

of wood. Let us take the ninth scale. Here the Absolute is 'hydrogen' 384 or water.

Water will be the Absolute for a piece of sugar."

But I was unable to grasp the principle on the basis of which it would be possible to

determine exactly when to make use of such a scale. P. showed me a table made up to

the fifth scale and relating to parallel levels in different worlds. But I got nothing from it. I began to think whether it was not possible to unite all these various scales with the various cosmoses. And having dwelt on this thought I went in an absolutely wrong

direction because the cosmoses of course had no relation whatever to the division of

the scale. It seemed to me at the same time that I had in general ceased to understand

anything in the "three octaves of radiations" from which the first scale of "hydrogens"

was deduced. The principal stumbling block here was the relation of the three forces 1,

2, 3 and 1, 3, 2 and the relations between "carbon," "oxygen," and "nitrogen."

At the same time I realized that this contained something important. And I left

Moscow with the unpleasant feeling that not only had I not acquired anything new but

that I seemed to have lost the old, that is, what I thought I had already understood.

We had an agreement in our group that whoever went to Moscow and heard any

new explanations or lectures must, on his arrival in St. Petersburg, communicate it all

to the others. But on the way to St. Petersburg while going carefully in my head

through the Moscow talks, I felt that I would not be able to communicate the principal

thing because I did not understand it myself. This irritated me and I did not know what

I was to do. In this state I arrived at St. Petersburg and on the following day I went to our meeting.

Trying to draw out as much as possible the beginning of the "diagrams," as we

called a part of G.'s system, dealing with general questions and laws, I began to

convey the general impressions of my journey. And all the time I was saying one

thing, in my head another thing was running: How shall I begin—what does the

transition 1, 2, 3 into 1, 3, 2 mean? Can an example of such a transition be found in the phenomena we know?

I felt that I must find something now, immediately, because unless I found

something myself first I could say nothing to the others.

I began to draw the diagram on the board. It was the diagram of radiations in three

octaves: Absolute-sun-earth-moon. We were already accustomed to this terminology and to G.'s form of exposition. But I did not know at all what I would say beyond

what they knew already.

And suddenly a single word, which came into my head and which no one had

pronounced in Moscow, connected and explained everything: "a moving diagram." I realized that it was necessary to imagine this diagram as a moving one, all the links in the chain changing places as in some mystical dance.

I felt so much in this word that for some time I did not hear myself what I was

saying. But after I had collected my thoughts I saw that they were listening to me and

that I had explained everything I had not understood myself on the way to the

meeting. This gave me an extraordinarily strong and clear sensation as though I had

discovered for myself new possibilities, a new method of perception and