Tertium Organum (P.D. Ouspensky) · 165 of 225 · tr. Nicholas Bessaraboff and Claude Bragdon
Chapter XXI (part 3)
All attempts to penetrate mentally into that higher, noumenal world, or world of causes, by means of the logic of the phenomenal world, if they did not fail altogether, or did not lead to castles in the air , gave only one result: in becoming conscious of a new order of things, a man lost the sense of the reality of the old order.
The visible world began to seem to him fantastic and unreal, everything all about him was disappearing, was vanishing like smoke, leaving a dreadful feeling of illusion .
In everything he felt the abyss of infinity, and everything was plunging into the abyss.
This sense of the infinite is the first and most terrible trial before initiation.
Nothing exists!
A little miserable soul feels itself suspended in an infinite void.
Then even this void disappears!
Nothing exists.
There is only infinity, a constant and continuous division and dissolution of everything.
The mystical literature of p.
258 all peoples abounds in references to this sensation of darkness and emptiness .
Such was that mysterious deity of the ancient Egyptians, about which there exists a story in the Orpheus myth, in which it is de-scribed as a " Thrice-unknown darkness in contemplation of which all knowledge is resolved into ignorance ." 1 This means that man must have felt horror transcending all limits as he approached the world of causes with the knowledge of the world of phenomena only, his instrument of logic having proved useless, because all the new eluded him.
In the new as yet he sensed chaos only, the old had disappeared, gone away and become unreal.
Horror and regret for the loss of the old mingled with horror of the new—unknown and terrible by its infinitude .
At this stage man experiences the same thing that an animal, becoming a man, would feel.
Having looked into a new world for an instant, it is attracted by the life left behind.
The world which it saw only for an instant seems but a dream, a vision, the creation of imagination, but the familiar old world, too, is never thereafter the same, it is too narrow, in it there is not sufficient room.
The awakening consciousness can no longer live the free life of the beast.
Already it knows something different, it hears some voices, even though the body holds it.
And the animal does not know where or how it can escape from the body or from itself.
A man on the threshold of a new world experiences literally the same thing.
He has heard celestial harmonies, and the wearisome songs of earth touch him no longer, nor do they move him—or if they touch and move him it is because they remind him of celestial harmonies, of the inaccessible, of the unknown.
He has experienced the sensation of an unusual EXPANSION of consciousness, when everything was clear to him for a moment, and he cannot reconcile himself to the sluggish earthly work of the brain.
These moments of the "sensation of infinity" are accompanied by unusual emotions.
In theosophical literature, and in books on occultism, it is often asserted that on entering into the "astral" world, man begins to see new colors, colors which are not in the solar spectrum.
2 In p.
259 this symbolism of the new colors of the "astral sphere" is conveyed the idea of those new emotions which man begins to feel along with the sensation of the expansion of consciousness—"of the sea pouring into the drop." This is the "strange bliss" of which mystics speak, the "heavenly light" which saints "see," the "new" sensations experienced by poets.
Even conversational psychology identifies "ecstasy" with entirely unusual sensations, inaccessible and unknown to man in the life of every day.
Describing the divine only by negation—God transcends all positive categories and concepts; the via negativa.
[auto] The passage describes the higher world as 'Thrice-unknown darkness' where 'all knowledge is resolved into ignorance,' emphasizing negation over positive description.
John of the Cross's stage of contemplative purgation: a felt absence and aridity of God that strips the soul of attachments to its own consolations en route to deeper union.
The passage explicitly references the 'sensation of darkness and emptiness' and 'horror' as a trial before initiation, mirroring the purgative stage.
Eckhart's Abgeschiedenheit/Gelassenheit — radical letting-go of will, image, and grasping that opens the soul to God; distinct from inner_silence (quietness) and from material renunciation, and adjacent to Sufi tark and Buddhist non-grasping as a practice rather than a metaphysical claim.
The experience of losing the 'sense of the reality of the old order' implies a radical letting-go of worldly attachments.
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.
The passage identifies 'ecstasy' with unusual sensations and a 'strange bliss' inaccessible in daily life.
Ecstatic irrational rapture — Plato's mania, Bruno's furore — by which the soul transcends ordinary reason and attains direct contact with divine reality; madness reframed as higher knowledge.
The text details 'horror transcending all limits,' 'ecstasy,' and 'unusual emotions' that transcend ordinary reason and daily life.
Sufi self-effacement in God — the via by which the lover is unmade as a separate ego and recovered as God's act; specifies the practice/event rather than mystical_union's resulting state.
The soul feels 'suspended in an infinite void' and then 'even this void disappears,' describing the annihilation of self and world perception.
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 passage repeatedly emphasizes the 'abyss of infinity,' 'Nothing exists,' and a 'constant and continuous division and dissolution of everything' as the core mystical experience.
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.
As an Ouspensky text, it describes the 'sluggish earthly work of the brain' and the awakening consciousness leaving the 'free life of the beast.'
Eckhart's radical reading of Matthew 5:3 — the saint as one who wants nothing, knows nothing, and has nothing, having emptied even the will and the self with which to receive God; distinct from renunciation_of_wealth (material poverty).
The declaration 'Nothing exists!' and the experience of the void align with the radical emptiness of spirit.
The Buddhist doctrine that all phenomena lack independent self-nature; emptiness as the positive recognition that things arise only in dependence on conditions — distinct from kenoma's mere deficiency.
The declaration 'Nothing exists!' and the experience of an 'infinite void' align with the phenomenological recognition of emptiness.