Tertium Organum (P.D. Ouspensky) · 194 of 225 · tr. Nicholas Bessaraboff and Claude Bragdon
Chapter XXII (part 22)
I seemed to be directly under the foot of God, and I thought he was grinding his own life up out of my pain.
Then I saw that what he had been trying with all his might to do was to change his course, to bend the line of lightning to which he was tied, in the direction in which he wanted to go.
I felt my flexibility and helplessness, and I knew that he would succeed.
He bended me, turning his corner by means of my hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at the acutest point of this, as he passed, I, SAW.
"I understood for a moment things that I have now forgotten, things that no one could remember while retaining sanity.
The angle was an obtuse angle, and I remember thinking as I woke that had he made it a right or acute angle, I should have both suffered and 'seen' still more, and should probably have died.
"He went on and I came to.
In that moment the whole of my life passed before me, including each little meaningless piece of distress, and I understood them.
This is what it had all meant, this was the piece of work it had all been contributing to do.
"I did not see God's purpose.
I only saw his intentness and his entire relentlessness toward his means.
He thought no more of me than a man p.
301 thinks of hurting a cartridge when he is firing.
And yet, on waking, my first feeling was, and it came with tears, 'Domine non sum digna,' for I had been lifted into a position for which I was too small.
I, realized that in that half hour under ether I had served God more distinctly and purely than I had ever done in my life before, or than I, am capable of desiring to do.
I was the means of his achieving and revealing something, I know not what or to whom, and that to the exact extent of my capacity for suffering.
"While regaining consciousness L wondered why, since I had gone so deep, I had seen nothing of what saints call the love of God, nothing but his relentlessness.
And then I heard an answer, which I could only just catch, saying, 'Knowledge and Love are One, and the measure is suffering'—I give the words as they came to me.
With that I came finally to into what seemed a dream world compared with the reality of what I, was leaving.
.
.
." I.
S.
Symonds, whom Prof.
James mentions, tells of an interesting mystical experience with chloroform: "After the choking and stifling had passed away, I seemed at first in a state of utter blankness, then came flashes of intense light, alternating with blackness, and with a keen vision of what was going on in the room around me, but no sensation of touch.
I thought that I was near death; when suddenly, my soul became aware of God, who was manifestly dealing with me, handling me, so to speak, in an intense personal present reality.
I felt him streaming in like light upon me.
I cannot describe the ecstacy I felt.
Then as I gradually awoke from the influence of the anæsthetic, the old sense of my relation to the world began to return, and the new sense of my relation to God began to fade.
I suddenly leapt to my feet on the chair where I was sitting, and shrieked out, 'It is too horrible, it is too horrible, it is too horrible,' meaning that I could not bear this disillusionment.
At last I awoke .
.
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calling to the two surgeons (who were frightened) 'why did you not kill me?
Why would you not let me die?" Anæsthetic states are very similar to those strange moments experienced by epileptics during their fits of illness.
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 narrator accepts being used as a means ('I was the means of his achieving'), letting go of personal will.
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 experience is induced by anesthesia/ether, described as a 'dream world compared with the reality' and involving ecstasy.
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 experience involves seeing things 'that no one could remember while retaining sanity,' framing the vision as a state beyond ordinary reason.
Pronoia — the doctrine that the divine actively orders the unfolding of the cosmos and human affairs toward intelligible ends, against pure chance or blind necessity.
The passage emphasizes God's 'intentness and his entire relentlessness toward his means' in ordering the narrator's life and suffering.
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 narrator describes being bent and hurt as a means to God's end, realizing they were 'too small' for the position, indicating self-effacement.
Transgressive knowing acquired against divine prohibition — the Watchers' teaching of metallurgy, sorcery, and cosmetics in 1 Enoch, the Gnostic Eve narratives, the Promethean mytheme; explicitly contrasted with gnosis_direct_knowledge, which is salvific.
The knowledge gained is inaccessible to those retaining sanity, acting as a transgressive boundary of human cognition.
Salvation through direct experiential knowledge of the divine nature, not through faith, ritual, or moral works alone.
[auto] The passage centers on a direct experiential vision where the narrator understands forgotten things and the meaning of his life through suffering.
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 narrator cries 'Domine non sum digna' and realizes they were 'too small' for the position, reflecting radical humility.
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.
Symonds expresses horror at returning to the normal world ('It is too horrible'), indicating a painful separation from the divine state experienced.