Tertium Organum (P.D. Ouspensky) · 175 of 225 · tr. Nicholas Bessaraboff and Claude Bragdon
Chapter XXII (part 3)
These Eleatic ideas—namely that there is and there can be only One Absolute Being, infinite., unchangeable, without a second, without parts and passions—are the same ideas which underlie the Upanishads and have been fully worked out in the Vedânta-Sutras .
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273 In most of the religions of the ancient world [says Müller] the relation between the soul and God has been represented as a return of the soul to God.
A yearning for God, a kind of divine home-sickness, finds expression in most religions, but the road that is to lead us home, and the reception which the soul may expect in the Father's house have been represented in very different ways in different religions.
According to some religious teachers, a return of the soul to God is possible after death only.
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According to other religious teachers, the final beatitude of the soul can be achieved in this life.
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That beatitude requires knowledge only, knowledge of the necessary unity of what is divine in man with what is divine in God.
The Brahmins call it self-knowledge, that is to say, the knowledge that our true self, if it is anything, can only be that Self which is All in All, and beside which there is nothing else.
Sometimes this conception of the intimate relation between the human and the divine natures comes suddenly, as the result of an unexplained intuition or self-recollection.
Sometimes, however, it seems as if the force of logic had driven the human mind to the same result.
If God had once been recognized as the Infinite in nature and the soul as the Infinite in man, it seemed to follow that there could not be two Infinites.
The Eleatics had clearly passed through a similar phase of thought in their own philosophy.
If there is an Infinite, they said, it is one, for if there were two they could not be In-finite, but would be finite one toward the other.
But that which exists is infinite, and there cannot be more such.
Therefore that which exists is one.
Nothing can be more definite than this Eleatic Monism, and with it the admission of a soul, the Infinite in man, as different from God, the Infinite in nature, would have been inconceivable.
In India it was so expressed that Brahman and Atman (the spirit) were in their nature one.
The early Christians also, at least those who had been brought up in the schools of Neo-platonist philosophy, had a clear perception that if the soul is infinite and immortal in its nature, it cannot be anything beside God, but that it must be of God and in God.
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Paul gave but his own bold expression to the same faith or knowledge, when he uttered the words which have startled so many theologians: In Him we live and move and have our being .
If anyone else had uttered these words they would at once have been condemned as pantheism.
No doubt they are pantheism, and yet they express the very key-note of Christianity.
The divine sonship of man is only a metaphorical expression but it was meant originally to embody the same idea.
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And when the question was asked how the consciousness of this divine sonship could ever have been lost, the answer given by Christianity was, by sin, the answer given by the Upanishads was, by avidya , nescience.
This marks the similarity, and at the same time the characteristic difference between these two religions.
The question how nescience laid hold on the human soul, and made it imagine that it could live or move or have its true p.
274 being anywhere but in Brahman , remains as unanswerable in Hindu philosophy as in Christianity the question how sin first came into the world.
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.
The text contrasts the 'Infinite in nature' with the 'Infinite in man,' suggesting a structural identity between the human and the divine cosmos.
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.
The text discusses how consciousness of divine sonship was lost through 'sin' or 'avidya' (nescience).
The doctrine — central to Eastern Orthodox and Maximian theology — that the human person is progressively transformed into a partaker of the divine nature by grace, not merely justified or united in passing ecstasy.
References to 'divine sonship' and being 'of God and in God' reflect the doctrine of humans partaking in the divine nature.