Tertium Organum (P.D. Ouspensky) · 174 of 225 · tr. Nicholas Bessaraboff and Claude Bragdon
Chapter XXII (part 2)
What do we know of the Jews at the time of Moses, except the traditions preserved in the Laws and the Prophets?
It is the prophets, the poets, the lawgivers and teachers, however small their number, who speak in the name of the people, and who alone stand out to represent the nondescript multitude behind them, to speak their thoughts and to express their sentiments.
Real Indian philosophy, even in that embryonic form in which we find it in the Upanishads , stands completely by itself.
And if we ask what was the highest purpose of the teachings of the Upanishads we can state it in three words, as it has been stated by the greatest Vedânta 1 teachers themselves, namely Tat twam asi .
This means Thou art That .
That stands for that which is known to us under different names in different systems of ancient and modern philosophy.
It is Zeus or the Eis Theos or To On in Greece; it is what Plato meant by the Eternal Idea , what Agnostics call the p.
272 [paragraph continues] Unknowable , what I call the Infinite in Nature .
This is what in India is called Brahman , the being behind all beings, the power that emits the universe, sustains it and draws it back again to itself.
The Thou is what I called the Infinite in man , the Soul, the Self, the being behind every human Ego, free from all bodily fetters, free from passions, free from all attachments ( Atman ).
The expression: Thou art That —means: thy soul is the Brahman; or in other words, the subject and the object of all being and of all knowing are one and the same.
This is the gist of what I call Psychological Religion or Theosophy , the highest summit of thought which the human mind has reached, which has found different expressions in different religions and philosophies, but nowhere such a clear and powerful realization as in the ancient Upanishads of India.
______ For as long as the individual soul does not free itself from Nescience, or a belief in duality, it takes something else for itself.
True knowledge of the Self or true self-knowledge, expresses itself in the words, " Thou art That " or " I am Brahman ," the nature of Brahman being unchangeable eternal cognition.
Until that stage has been reached, the individual soul is fettered by the body, by the organs of sense, nay even by the mind and its various functions.
The Soul (The Self) says the Vedânta philosopher, cannot be different from the Brahman , because Brahman comprehends all reality and nothing that really is can therefore be different from Brahman .
Secondly, the individual self cannot be conceived as a modification of Brahman , because Brahman by itself cannot be changed, whether by itself, because it is one and perfect in itself, or by anything outside of it (because there exists nothing outside of it).
Here we see [says Müller], the Vedântist moving on exactly the same stratum of thought in which Eleatic philosophers moved in Greece.
"If there is one Infinite," they said, "there cannot be another, for the other would limit the one, and thus render it finite, so, as applied to God, the Eleatics argued: "If God is to be the mightiest and the best, he must be one, for if there were two or more, he would not be the mightiest and best." The Eleatics continued their monistic argument by showing that this One Infinite Being cannot be divided, so that anything could be called a portion of it, because there is no power that could separate anything from it.
Nay, it cannot even have parts, for, as it has no beginning and no end, it can have no parts, for a part has a beginning and an 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.
The text mentions Brahman as the power that emits the universe, suggesting a flow from source to creation.
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 text refers to the 'Infinite in Nature' and the 'One Infinite Being' as the fundamental reality.