1586. The colourless figure that extends from the kingdom of bliss, through the plant kingdom and the step of the animal kingdom, and just touches the edge of the real human kingdom symbolises terrestrial human knowledge of the spiral cycle or the structure of truly eternal life. Since terrestrial human beings in general, as shown by the figure, can see this eternal structure of life only in the local area that extends from the crystallised or dense part of the kingdom of bliss, which is the same as the visible mineral kingdom, and beyond this sees only the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom, this latter kingdom being the one in which they themselves appear as the highest "creatures", they believe that they constitute the entire life of the universe. All the other forces of Nature and centres of energy, such as the planets, suns and galaxies, are thus to them dead or lifeless chance forces. But since these forces represent eternity, this view of the world or perception of life reveals the terrestrial human being as a worshipper of "death". When stopping to think about it, what is a combination of energies or a terrestrial life lasting between seventy and a hundred years in relation to the rest of the universe or the ocean of energy that expresses "eternity"? Must not such a terrestrial life disappear in the endless ocean of centuries that make up the millennia and the aeons lasting millions and trillions of years, and so on? What would be the significance of a human being's creative achievement accomplished during such a period of even one hundred years? Indeed, even if the person in question had been a king or had been elected as president or head of state several times, even if he had created pyramids, palaces and temples that had been able to defy the workings of the tooth of time for thousands of years, these achievements could never claim to be anything more than a "speck of dust" compared with the externally manifested eternal process of creation and the originator of this process? To believe that this speck of dust is the highest existing life in the universe, the highest existing conscious centre of perception or experience, to believe that the seventy to one-hundred-year-old reality is life while the billion-year-old external phenomena are "death", is but to worship or cultivate "death" instead of life. If such a tiny sphere of life as that of terrestrial mankind were the highest expression of thought and exercise of will in the universe, this life, by its inconceivable insignificance in relation to the infinity and eternity of the rest of the universe, must fade from perceptibility as an invisible speck of dust that is but a "nothing", leaving the universe as a lifeless colossus, a withered leaf blown hither and thither by the haphazard nature of autumn storms. In truth, this is a hopeless view of the eternal life in which "we live and move and have our being", but a worthy contrast or background to this same life in the form of "cosmic consciousness", which allows the "speck of dust" to experience itself as eternity and infinity, as locality or temporality, and as the created, thereby revealing the identity of death as a mere "imaginary" or "created" opposite to the eternal existence of the I or the living being, a subordinate detail in its eternal exercise of will, experience and manifestation.