In Search of the Miraculous

"Each cosmos is an animate and intelligent being. Each cosmos is born, lives, and

dies. In one cosmos it is impossible to understand all the laws of the universe, but

three cosmoses taken together include in themselves all the laws of the universe, or two cosmoses, the one above and the other below, determine the cosmos which stands

between them." "By passing in his consciousness to the level of a higher cosmos, a man by this very fact passes to a level of a lower cosmos."

I felt that here in each word was a clue to the understanding of the structure of the

world, but there were too many clues; I did not know from which to start.

How would movement from one cosmos to another appear and where and when

would the movement disappear? In what relation would the figures found by me stand

to the more or less established figures of cosmic movements, as for instance the speed

of movement of the heavenly bodies, the speed of movement of the electrons in an

atom, the speed of light, and so on?

When I began to compare the movements of various cosmoses, I obtained some

very startling correlations, for example, for the earth, the period of its rotation on its axis was equal to one ten-thousandth of a second, that is, the speed of an electric

spark. It is very doubtful whether at such a speed the earth could notice its rotation on its axis. If man rotated, rotation round the sun should occupy about one twenty-fifth of

a

second, the speed of an instantaneous photograph. And taking into consideration the

enormous distance which the earth has had to traverse in this time, the inevitable

inference is that the earth could not be conscious of itself as we know it, that is, in the form of a sphere, but must be conscious of itself as a ring, or as a long spiral of rings.

The latter was the more probable on the basis of the definition of the present as the time of breath. This was by the way the first thought that came into my mind when, a

year previously, after the first lecture on cosmoses, G., in adding to what he had said

earlier, said that time is breath. I thought at the time that perhaps he meant that breath was the unit of time, that is to say, that for direct sensation the period of breath is felt as the present. Starting from this and supposing that the sensation of self, that is, of one's body, is connected with the sensation of the present, I came to the conclusion

that for the earth, with one breath in eighty years, the sensation of itself should be

connected with eighty rings of a spiral. I had obtained a completely unexpected

confirmation of all the conclusions and inferences of the New Model of the Universe.

Passing to the lower cosmoses, that is, to the cosmoses in my table which stood to

the left of man, I found already in the first of them the explanation of what had always appeared to me the most enigmatic and most inexplicable in the work of our organism,

namely, the astonishing speed, which was almost instantaneous, of many inner

processes. It had always seemed to me to be almost charlatanism on the part of physiologists that no due significance had been attributed to this fact. Science, of course, explains only what it can explain. But in this case it ought not, in my opinion, to

conceal the fact and avoid it as if it did not exist, but should constantly draw attention to it, put it on record on every suitable occasion. A man who gives no thought to

questions of physiology may not be astonished at the fact that the drinking of a cup of

strong coffee or a glass of brandy, or inhaling the smoke of a cigarette is immediately

felt in the whole body, changes all the inner correlation of forces and the form and

character of the reactions, but it ought to be clear to a physiologist that in this quite imperceptible interval of time, approximately equal to one breath, a long series of

complicated chemical and other processes are accomplished in the organism. The

substance which has entered the organism is carefully analyzed, the smallest

divergence from the usual is immediately noticed; in the process of analysis it passes

through a series of laboratories; it is resolved into its component parts and mixed with

other substances and in the form of these mixtures it is added to the fuel which

nourishes the various nerve centers. All this must occupy a great deal of time. The

seconds in our time in which this is accomplished make all this entirely fantastic and

miraculous. But the fantastic side falls away when we realize that for the large cells

which obviously govern the life of the organism, our one breath continues for over

twenty-four

hours. In twenty-four hours, even in half that time, even in a third, that is, in eight hours (which is equal to one second), it is possible to imagine all the processes which,

have been indicated being completed in an orderly way, exactly as they would be