| 90 milliard years | 3J015 years | 91019 years | 31023 years | 91028 years |
| 300,000,000 second | 10,000 second | seconds | | | million years | | (number of 16 figures) | (number of 20 figures) | (number of 24 figures) | (number of 29 figures) |
This table at once aroused in me very many thoughts. Whether it was possible to look upon it as correct and as defining exactly the relation of one cosmos to another I was as yet unable to say. The coefficient 30, 000 seemed too big. But at the same time I remembered that the relation of one cosmos to another is 'as zero to infinity.' And in the presence of such a relation no coefficient could be too big. 'The relation of zero to infinity' was the relation of magnitudes of different dimensions.
G. said that every cosmos was three-dimensional for itself. This meant that the next cosmos above it was four-dimensional for it and the next cosmos below it—two- dimensional. The next one above that—five-dimensional, and the next one lower— one-dimensional. One cosmos in relation to another is a magnitude of a greater or smaller number of dimensions. But there could only be six dimensions or, with zero, seven, and by this table eleven cosmoses were obtained. At the first glance this seemed strange, but only at the first glance, because as soon as I took into account the period of existence of any cosmos in relation to higher cosmoses, the lower cosmoses disappeared long before reaching the seventh dimension. Take for example man in relation to the sun. The sun appeared as the fourth cosmos in relation to man, taking man as the first cosmos, but man's long life, eighty years, was equal in time to one electric spark for the sun, one shortest possible visual impression.
I tried to remember everything that G. had said about cosmoses.
'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 completed in a large and well-arranged 'chemical factory'
