Tertium Organum (P.D. Ouspensky) · 112 of 225 · tr. Nicholas Bessaraboff and Claude Bragdon
Chapter XV (part 5)
When one encounters these perversions of love, one involuntarily calls to mind the words of Zarathustra: 2 Voluptuousness: unto all hair-shirted despisers of the body, a string p.
173 and stake; and cursed as "the world" by all backworldsmen : for it mocketh and befooleth all erring, misinferring teachers.
Voluptuousness: to the rabble the slow fire at which it is burnt: to all wormy wood, to all stinking rags, the prepared heat and stew furnace.
Voluptuousness: to free hearts, a thing innocent and free, the garden-happiness of the earth, all the future's thanks-overflow to the present.
Voluptuousness: only to the withered a sweet poison: to the lion-willed, however, the great cordial, and the reverently saved wine of wines.
Voluptuousness: the great symbolic happiness of a higher happiness and highest hope.
For to many is marriage promised and more than marriage—to many that are more unknown to each other than man and woman—and who hath fully understood how unknown to each other are man and woman.
______ I have dwelt so long on the subject of the understanding of love because it has the most vital significance; because to the majority of men, approaching the threshold of the great mystery, much is closed or opened to them in this way, and because for many this question represents the greatest obstacle.
In love the most important element is that which is not , which absolutely does not exist from the usual worldly, materialistic point of view.
In this sensing of that which is not, and in the contact through it with the world of the wondrous, i.e., truly real, consists the principal element of love in human life.
It is a well-known psychological fact that in moments of powerful emotion, of great joy or great suffering, everything happening round about a man seems to him unreal —a dream.
This is the beginning of the soul's awakening.
When a man in a dream begins to be conscious of the fact that he is asleep and that what he sees is a dream, then he is waking up; so also the soul, beginning to be conscious of the fact that all visible life is a dream, approaches its awakening.
And the more powerful, the brighter the inner emotions are, so much the more quickly will the moment of consciousness of the unreality of life come.
It is very interesting to consider love and men's relation to love in the light of that method and those analogies which we have already applied to the comparative study of different dimensions.
Again it is necessary to imagine a world of plane beings, observing phenomena entering their plane from another unknowable p.
174 world (such as the change of the color of lines on a plane, in reality depending upon the rotation through the plane of a wheel with many-coloured spokes).
The plane beings believe that the phenomena arise within the limits of their plane, from causes also belonging to the same plane, and that they are finished there.
Also, all similar phenomena are to them identical, such as two circles which in reality belong to two entirely different objects.
On this foundation they erect their science and their morality.
Yet if they would decide to discard their "two-dimensional" psychology and try to understand the true substance of these phenomena, then with the aid and by means of these phenomena they could sever their connection with their plane, arise, fly up above it, and discover a great unknown world.
The question of love holds exactly the same place in our life.
Only he who can see considerably beyond the facts discerns love's real meaning; and it is possible to illumine these very facts by the light of that which lies behind them.
And he who is able to see beyond the "facts" begins to discern much of "newness" in love and through love .
Ecstatic, non-rational receptivity to the divine figured as drunkenness — Plato's symposium wine, Rumi's sukr, Eckhart's 'sober drunkenness'; the passive/receptive metaphor for divine encounter, distinct from divine_madness's active possessing rapture.
Voluptuousness is described as the 'reverently saved wine of wines' for the lion-willed.
Salvation through direct experiential knowledge of the divine nature, not through faith, ritual, or moral works alone.
[auto] The passage describes the soul's awakening through sensing that which is not materially real, emphasizing direct consciousness over worldly facts.
Bruno's eroici furori — a passionate, ennobling spiritual ardor that drives the soul toward divine wisdom; distinguished from base or animal passions by its orientation to infinite truth.
The 'lion-willed' are contrasted with the withered, suggesting a higher spiritual will.
Gurdjieff and Ouspensky's claim that ordinary human beings live in a state of waking sleep, reacting mechanically without unified will or consciousness, and that the spiritual path begins with recognising this condition.
[auto] The passage describes ordinary life as a dream and plane beings trapped in their dimension, requiring awakening to true reality.
The felt condition of exile from one's divine origin — Rumi's reed flute torn from its bed, Plotinus's 'we have forgotten,' the Gnostic forgetfulness; the affective wound that complements return_to_source and gives the return its motive.
Visible life is described as a dream from which the soul must awaken to contact the truly real.