Tertium Organum (P.D. Ouspensky) · 207 of 225 · tr. Nicholas Bessaraboff and Claude Bragdon
Chapter XXIII (part 9)
Further, it should be noted, as the possession of concepts implies the possession of language, so the possession of concepts and language (which are in reality two aspects of the same thing) implies the possession of self-consciousness.
All this means that there is a moment in the evolution of mind when the receptual intellect, capable of simple consciousness only, becomes almost or quite instantaneously a conceptual intellect in possession of language and self-consciousness.
Our intellect, then, today is made up of a very complex mixture of percepts, recepts and concepts.
The next chapter in the story is the accumulation of concepts.
This is a double process, each individual accumulates a larger and larger number while the individual concepts are becoming constantly more and more complex.
Is there to be any limit to this growth of concepts in number and complexity?
Whoever will seriously consider that question will see that there must be a limit.
No such process could go on to infinity.
We have seen that the expansion of the perceptual mind had a necessary limit: that its continued life led inevitably up to and into the receptual mind; p.
318 that the receptual mind by its own growth was inevitably led up to and into the conceptual mind.
A priori considerations make it certain that a corresponding outlet will be found for the conceptual mind.
But we do not need to depend upon abstract reasoning to demonstrate the necessary existence of the supra-conceptual mind, since it exists and can be studied with no more difficulty than other natural phenomena.
The supra-conceptual intellect, the elements of which instead of being concepts are intuitions, is already (in small numbers it is true) an established fact, and the form of consciousness that belongs to that intellect may be called and has been called—Cosmic Consciousness.
The basic fact in cosmic consciousness is implied in its name—that fact is consciousness of the cosmos—this is what is called in the East the "Brahmic Splendor," which is in Dante's phrase capable of trans-humanizing a man into a god.
Whitman, who has an immense deal to say about it, speaks of it in one place as "ineffable light—light rare, untellable, lighting the very light—beyond all signs, description, languages." This consciousness shows the cosmos to consist not of dead matter governed by unconscious, rigid, and unintending law; it shows it on the contrary as entirely immaterial, entirely spiritual and entirely alive; it shows that death is an absurdity, that everyone and everything has eternal life; it shows that the universe is God and that God is the Universe.
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A great deal of this is of course, from the point of view of self-consciousness, absurd; it is nevertheless undoubtedly true.
Now all this does not mean that when a man has cosmic consciousness he knows everything about the universe.
We all know that when at three years of age we acquired self-consciousness, we did not at once know all about ourselves.
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So neither does a man know all about the cosmos merely because he becomes conscious of it.
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If it has taken the race several thousand years to learn a smattering of the science of humanity since its acquisition of self-consciousness, so it may take it millions of years to acquire cosmic consciousness.
As on self-consciousness is based the human world as we see it with all its works and ways, so on cosmic consciousness is based the higher religions and the higher philosophies and what comes from them, and on it will be based, when it becomes more general, a new world of which it would be idle to try to speak today.
The philosophy of the birth of cosmic consciousness in the individual is very similar to that of the birth of self-consciousness.
A chain of divine beings or principles flowing downward from a single transcendent source (the One or the Father), each level less perfect than the one above.
The text describes a hierarchical evolution of mind types (perceptual, receptual, conceptual, supra-conceptual) resembling an emanation chain.
Salvation through direct experiential knowledge of the divine nature, not through faith, ritual, or moral works alone.
[auto] The text describes the supra-conceptual intellect as relying on 'intuitions' rather than concepts, representing direct experiential knowledge of the cosmos.
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 passage links the individual's acquisition of cosmic consciousness to the basis of the higher world and cosmos.
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 references Dante's phrase describing the state as capable of 'trans-humanizing a man into a god.'
The doctrine that all existence is ultimately one substance or one divine reality; non-duality as a theological claim.
[auto] The passage explicitly states that cosmic consciousness shows 'the universe is God and that God is the Universe,' affirming non-duality as a central theme.