Tertium Organum (P.D. Ouspensky) · 191 of 225 · tr. Nicholas Bessaraboff and Claude Bragdon
Chapter XXII (part 19)
The Sufi poets frequently lived the strange lives of hermits, anchorites and wanderers, at the same time singing of love, the beauty of women, the aroma of roses and wine.
Jêlal eddîn describes as follows the communion of the soul with God: A loved one said to her lover to try him early one morning: "O such a one, son of such a one, I marvel whether you hold me more dear, or yourself; tell me truly, O ardent lover!" He answered: "I am so entirely absorbed in you, that I am full of you from head to foot.
Of my own existence nothing but the man remains, in my being is nothing beside you, O object of my desire.
Therefore I am thus lost in you.
As a stone which has been changed into a pure ruby, is filled with the bright light of the sun."—(Max Müller.) In two well-known poems of Jami (XV century), Salaman and Abasl and Yusuf and Zulaikha , the "ascending of the soul," its purification and its union with God, is represented in the most passionate forms.
______ Prof.
James pays great attention in his book to mystical states under narcosis .
"This is a realm that public opinion and ethical philosophy have p.
297 long since branded as pathological, though private practice and certain lyric strains of poetry seem still to bear witness of its ideality.
"Nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently diluted with air, stimulates the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree.
Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler.
This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to; and if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to be the veriest nonsense.
Nevertheless, the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists; and I know more than one person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation.
"Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print.
One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken.
It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness , whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there are potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation.
No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.
At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.
"The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also.
"Looking back on my experiences, they all converge toward a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance.
The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation.
It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictions and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity.
Not only do they, as contrasted species, belong to one and the same genus, but one of the species —the nobler p.
298 and the better one— is itself the genus, so soaks up and absorbs its opposite into itself .
This is a dark saying, I know, when thus expressed in terms of common logic, but I cannot wholly escape from its authority.
The transformation of base substance — outer matter or the inner soul — into a purified, perfected, or 'gold' state; the magnum opus as both laboratory practice and spiritual allegory.
Rumi's metaphor of a stone changed into a pure ruby filled with light mirrors the alchemical transformation of base to gold.
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.
[auto] James discusses nitrous oxide intoxication stimulating mystical consciousness, and Sufi poets sing of wine as metaphors for divine encounter.
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.
James discusses mystical states under narcosis being branded pathological yet ideal, aligning with ecstatic irrational rapture.
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.
[auto] Rumi's quote describes the self being 'lost in you' with 'nothing but the man remains,' which defines Sufi self-effacement.
Diotima's staged ascent from love of beautiful bodies → beautiful souls → beautiful pursuits → beautiful knowledge → Beauty itself; the canonical scala amoris that grounds Plotinus's On the Beautiful and Bruno's Eroici Furori — distinct from generic spiritual_ascent in that eros is the specific motive force.
Sufi poets sing of love as the path to God, using eros as the motive force for spiritual ascent.
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.
James contrasts 'normal waking consciousness' with other potential forms, implying the limitation of ordinary human awareness.
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.
The transformation of the stone into a ruby filled with light suggests the human becoming partaker of divine nature.