Tertium Organum (P.D. Ouspensky) · 204 of 225 · tr. Nicholas Bessaraboff and Claude Bragdon
Chapter XXIII (part 6)
Doubt of God and of eternal life will be as impossible as is now doubt of existence; the evidence of each will be the same.
Religion will govern every minute of every day of all life.
Churches, priests, forms, creeds, prayers, all agents, all intermediaries between the individual man and God will be permanently replaced by direct unmistakable intercourse.
Sin will no longer exist nor will salvation be desired.
Men will not worry about death or a future, about the kingdom of heaven, about what may come with and after the cessation of the life of the present body.
Each soul will feel and know itself to be immortal, will feel and know that the entire universe with all its good and with all its beauty is for it and belongs to it forever.
The world peopled by men possessing cosmic consciousness will be as far removed from the world p.
314 of today as this is from the world as it was before the advent of self-consciousness.
III There is a tradition, probably very old, to the effect that the first man was innocent and happy until he ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
That having eaten thereof he became aware that he was naked and was ashamed.
Further, that there sin was born into the world, the miserable sense whereof replaced man's former feeling of innocency; that then and not till then man began to labor and to cover his body.
Stranger than all, the story runs, that along with this change or immediately following upon it there came into man's mind the remarkable conviction which has never since left it, but which has been kept alive by its own inherent vitality and by the teaching of all true seers, prophets and poets that man will be saved by the rising up within him of a Savior—the Christ.
Man's progenitor was a creature with simple consciousness merely.
He was (as are today the animals) incapable of sin and equally incapable of shame (at least in the human sense).
He had no feeling or knowledge of good and evil.
He as yet knew nothing of what we call work and had never labored.
From this state he fell (or rose) into self-consciousness, his eyes were opened, he knew he was naked, he felt shame, acquired the sense of sin (became in fact what is called a sinner) and learned to do certain things in order to encompass certain ends—that is, he learned to labor.
For weary aeons this condition has lasted—the sense of sin still haunts his pathway—by the sweat of his brow he still eats bread—he is still ashamed.
Where is the deliverer, the Savior?
Who or what?
The Savior of man is Cosmic Consciousness—in Paul's language, the Christ.
The cosmic sense (in whatever mind it appears) crushes the serpent's head—destroys sin, shame, the sense of good and evil, as contrasted one with the other, and will annihilate labor, though not human activity.
IV A personal exposition of the writer's own experience of cosmic consciousness may help the reader to understand the meaning of the following facts: In childhood he was subject at times to a sort of ecstasy of curiosity and hope.
As on one special occasion when about ten years old he earnestly longed to die that the secrets of the beyond, if there were any beyond, might be revealed to him.
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At the age of thirty he fell in with "Leaves of Grass," and at once saw that it contained, in greater measure than any book so far found, what he had so long been looking for.
He read the "Leaves" eagerly, even passionately, but for several years derived little from them.
At last light broke and there was revealed to him (as far perhaps as such things can be revealed) p.
315 at least some of the meanings.
Then occurred that to which the foregoing is the preface.
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.
[auto] The passage details the myth of eating the fruit of knowledge of good and evil as the cause of sin, shame, and labor, contrasting it with salvific Cosmic Consciousness.
Salvation through direct experiential knowledge of the divine nature, not through faith, ritual, or moral works alone.
[auto] The passage emphasizes direct unmistakable intercourse with God replacing intermediaries and faith, where evidence is as immediate as existence.
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 description of labor, shame, and the sweat of the brow aligns with Ouspensky's concept of ordinary mechanical existence.
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 passage describes the Fall into self-consciousness as a loss of innocence and a state of shame and labor separating man from his original state.
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 text identifies the Savior as Cosmic Consciousness within man, implying a transformation into a divine state.