Tertium Organum (P.D. Ouspensky) · 193 of 225 · tr. Nicholas Bessaraboff and Claude Bragdon
Chapter XXII (part 21)
Blood describes the value of the anæsthetic revelation for life as follows: "The Anæsthetic Revelation is the initiation of man into the mystery of the open secret of Being, revealed as the inevitable vortex of continuity.
Inevitable is the word.
Its motive is inherent—it is what has to be.
It is not for any love or hate, nor for joy or sorrow, nor good nor ill.
End, beginning, or purpose, it knows not of.
"It affords no particular of the multiplicity and variety of things; but it fills the appreciation of the historical and the sacred with a secular and intimately personal illumination of the nature and motive of existence.
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"Although it is at first startling in its solemnity, it becomes directly such a matter of course—so old-fashioned, and so akin to proverbs, that it inspires exultation rather than fear, and the sense of safety, as identified with the aboriginal and the universal.
But no words may express the surpassing certainty of the patient that he is realizing the primordial Adamic surprise of life.
"Repetition of the experience finds it ever the same, and as if it could not possibly be otherwise.
The subject resumes his normal consciousness only to partially and fitfully remember its occurrence, and to try to formulate its baffling import—with this consolatory after-thought: that he has known the oldest truth, and that he has done with human theories as to the origin, meaning, or destiny of the race.
He is beyond instruction in 'spiritual things.' "The lesson is one of central safety; the kingdom is within.
All days are judgment days: but there can be no climacteric purpose of eternity, nor any scheme of the whole.
The astronomer abridges the row of bewildering figures by increasing his unit of measurement: so may we reduce the distracting multiplicity of things to the unity for which each of us stands.
"This has been my moral sustenance since I have known of it.
In my first printed mention of it I declared: The world is no more the alien p.
300 terror that was taught me.
Spurning the cloud-grimed and still sultry battlements whence so lately Jehovan thunders boomed, my gray gull lifts her wings against the nightfall, and takes the dim leagues with a fearless eye.
And now, after twenty-seven years of this experience, the wing is grayer, but the eye is fearless still, while I renew and doubly emphasize that declaration.
I know—as having known—the meaning of existence: the sane center of the universe—at once the wonder and the assurance of the soul—for which the speech of reason has as yet no name but the Anæsthetic Revelations." I subjoin, Prof.
James says, another interesting anæsthetic revelation.
This is what the subject, a gifted woman, writes about her experience, when she was taking ether for a surgical operation.
"I wondered if I was in a prison being tortured, and why I remembered, having heard it said that people 'learn through suffering,' and in view of what I was seeing, the inadequacy of this saying struck me so much that I said, aloud, 'to suffer is to learn.' With that I became unconscious again, and my last dream immediately preceded my real coming to.
It only lasted a few seconds and was most vivid and real to me, though it may not be clear in words.
"A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway.
The lightning was made of innumerable spirits close to one another, and I was one of them.
He moved in a straight line, and each part of the streak or flash came into its short conscious existence only that he might travel.
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 subject declares they have 'done with human theories as to the origin, meaning, or destiny of the race.'
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 revelation is induced by ether/anesthesia ('Anaesthetic Revelation'), functioning as a chemical intoxication leading to ecstatic knowledge.
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 text contrasts the revelation with 'normal consciousness' which only 'partially and fitfully remember[s]' the experience.
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 individual stands for the unity of existence, implying the human contains or reflects the cosmic center.