The Relative Understanding of Time

CHAPTER XVI

The Relative Understanding of Time

AFTER a short pause Beelzebub continued thus:

“Before telling you further about the three-brained beings who have taken your fancy and who breed on the planet Earth, it is in my opinion absolutely necessary for you, for a clear representation of the strangeness of their psyche and, in general, for a better understanding of everything concerning this peculiar planet, first of all to have an accurate representation of their time-calculation, and of how the being-sensation of what is called the ‘process-of-the-flow-of-time’ in the presences of the three-brained beings of that planet has gradually changed and also of how this process now flows in the presences of the contemporary three-brained beings there.

“It must be made clear to you because only then will you have the possibility clearly to represent to yourself and understand the events there which I have already related and those I shall yet relate.

“You must first know that for the definition of Time, the three-brained beings of that planet take the ‘year’ as the basic unit of their time-calculation, just as we do, and also, like us, they define the duration of their ‘year’ by the time of a certain movement of their planet in relation to another definite cosmic concentration; that is to say, they take that period in the course of which their planet, during its movement—that is, during the processes of ‘Falling’ and ‘Catching-up’—makes what is called its ‘Krentonalnian-revolution’ in relation to its sun.

“It is similar to our reckoning of a ‘year’ for our planet Karatas, which is the period of time between the nearest approach of the sun ‘Samos’ to the sun ‘Selos’ and its next similar approach.

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