Tertium Organum (P.D. Ouspensky) · 139 of 225 · tr. Nicholas Bessaraboff and Claude Bragdon
Chapter XVIII (part 2)
Evolutionists, followers of Darwin, say that the struggle for existence and the selection of the fittest created the mind and feeling of contemporary man—that mind and feeling SERVE LIFE, preserve the life of separate individuals and of the species—and that beyond this they have no meaning in themselves.
But it is possible to answer this with the same arguments before advanced against the mechanicality of the universe; namely, that if rationality exists, then nothing exists except rationality.
The struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, if they truly play such a rôle in the creation of life, are also not merely accidents, but products of a mind, CONCERNING WHICH WE DO NOT KNOW; and they also conduce, like everything else, TO A KNOWLEDGE.
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215 But we do not realize, do not discern the presence of rationality in the phenomena and laws of nature.
This happens because we study always not the whole but the part, and we do not divine that whole which we wish to study—by studying the little finger of a man we cannot discover his reason.
It is the same way in our relation to nature: we study always the little finger of nature.
When we come to realize this and shall understand that EVERY LIFE IS THE MANIFESTATION OF A PART OF SOME WHOLE, then only the possibility of knowledge of that whole opens to us.
In order to comprehend the rationality of a given whole, it is necessary to understand the character of the whole and its functions.
Thus the function of man is knowledge; but without understanding "man" as a whole, it is impossible to understand his function.
To understand our psyche, the function of which is knowledge, it is necessary to clear up our relation to life.
In Chapter X an attempt was made—a very artificial one, founded upon the analogy with a world of two-dimensional beings—to define life as motion in a sphere higher in dimensionality in comparison with ours.
From this standpoint every separate life is as it were the manifestation in our sphere of a part of one of the rational entities of another sphere.
These rationalities look in upon us, as it were, in these lives which we see.
When a man dies, one eye of the Universe closes , says Fechner.
Every separate human life is a moment of the life of some great being , which lives in us.
The life of every separate tree is a moment of the life of a being, "species" or "family." The rationalities of these higher beings do not exist independently of these lower lives.
They are two sides of one and the same thing.
Every single human psyche, in some other section of the world, may produce the illusion of many lives.
This is difficult to illustrate by an example.
But if we take Hinton's spiral, passing through a plane, and the point running in circles on the plane (see 70 ), and conceive of the spiral as the psyche, then the moving point of intersection of the spiral with the plane will be life .
This example illustrates a possible relation between the psyche and life.
To us, life and the psyche are different and separate from each other, because we are inept at seeing, inept at looking at things.
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216 [paragraph continues] And this in turn depends upon the fact that it is very difficult for us to step outside the frames of our divisions .
We see the life of a tree, of this tree ; and if we are told that the life of a tree is a manifestation of some psychic life, then we understand it in such a way that the life of this tree is the manifestation of the psychic life of this tree .
But this is of course an absurdity resulting from "three-dimensional thinking"—the "Euclidian" mind.
The life of this tree is a manifestation of the psychic life of the species , or family, or perhaps of the psychic life of the entire vegetable kingdom .
The Hermetic axiom that the structure of the cosmos is reflected at every scale — 'as above, so below; as within, so without' — making each level a legible map of the others.
The text describes lower lives as manifestations of parts of rational entities from a higher dimensional sphere.
Pronoia — the doctrine that the divine actively orders the unfolding of the cosmos and human affairs toward intelligible ends, against pure chance or blind necessity.
The struggle for existence and survival are described as conducing to a knowledge, implying an ordered end.
A chain of divine beings or principles flowing downward from a single transcendent source (the One or the Father), each level less perfect than the one above.
Higher rational entities in another sphere manifest as separate lives in our lower dimensional sphere.
The doctrine of the universe as boundless and without center or circumference, populated by innumerable worlds — Bruno's rejection of the closed Aristotelian sphere; the divine and the cosmos as ontologically infinite.
The discussion of higher dimensionality and the Universe implies a boundless reality beyond our sphere.
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.
The passage references arguments against the mechanicality of the universe and critiques the limited Euclidian mind.
The human being as a small-scale image of the entire cosmos; the body, soul, and intellect mirroring the structure of the heavens and the divine — distinct from correspondence in that it makes the human the privileged mirror.
Every separate human life is described as a moment of the life of some great being that lives in us.
The doctrine that all existence is ultimately one substance or one divine reality; non-duality as a theological claim.
[auto] The passage asserts that if rationality exists, nothing else exists except rationality, and that life and psyche are two sides of one and the same thing.