Tertium Organum (P.D. Ouspensky) · 217 of 225 · tr. Nicholas Bessaraboff and Claude Bragdon
Page 28 (part 1)
p.
333 CONCLUSION In conclusion I wish to speak of those wonderful words, full of profound mystery from the Apocalypse and the apostle Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians , which are placed as the epigraph of this book.
The Apocalyptic angel swears that THERE SHALL BE TIME NO LONGER.
We know not what the author of the Apocalypse wanted to convey, but we do know those STATES OF SPIRIT when time disappears.
We know that in this very thing, in the change of the time-sense , the beginning of the fourth form of consciousness is expressed, the beginning of the transition to COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS.
In this and in phrases similar to it, the profound philosophical content of the evangelical teaching sometimes flashes forth.
And the understanding of the fact that the MYSTERY OF TIME is the first mystery to be revealed is the first step toward the development of cosmic consciousness along the intellectual path.
But what did the Apocalyptic sentence mean?
Did it mean precisely what we are now able to construe in it—or was it simply a bit of verbal art, a rhetorical figure of speech, the accidental harping of a string which has continued to sound up to our own time, through centuries and millenniums, with such a wonderfully powerful, true and beautiful tone of thought?
We know not now, nor shall we ever, but the words are full of splendor, and we may accept them as a symbol of remote and inaccessible truth.
The apostle Paul's words are even more strange, even more startling by reason of their mathematical exactness.
(A friend showed me these words in A.
Dobroluboff's From the Book Invisible , who saw in them a direct reference to "the fourth measure of space.") Truly, what does this mean?
.
.
.
.
That ye, being rooted and grounded in love , may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the BREADTH and LENGTH and DEPTH and HEIGHT.
p.
334 First of all, what does the comprehension of breadth and length and depth and height mean?
What is it but the comprehension of space?
And we now know that the comprehension of the mysteries of space is the beginning of the higher comprehension.
The apostle says that "being rooted and grounded in love , with all saints " they may comprehend what space is .
Here arises the question: why must love give comprehension?
That love leads to sanctity —this is easily understood.
Love in the sense that the apostle Paul understands it (Chapter XIII of the First Epistle to the Corinthians ) is the highest of all emotions, the synthesis , the blending of all highest emotions.
Incontestably, this leads to sanctity .
Sanctity : that is the state of the spirit liberated from the duality of man, from his eternal disharmony of soul and body.
In the language of the apostle Paul sanctity meant even a little less than in our contemporary language.
He called all members of his church saints ; sanctity meant to him righteousness, morality, religiosity.
We say that all this is merely the path to sanctity .
Sanctity is something more—something attained .
But it is after all immaterial how we shall understand his words—in his meaning or in ours—sanctity is a superhuman quality.
In the region of morality it corresponds to genius in the region of mind.
Love is the path to sainthood .
But with sanctity the apostle Paul unites KNOWLEDGE.
Saints comprehend what is the breadth and length and depth and height; and he says that all—through love—may comprehend this with them.
But may comprehend what, exactly?
COMPREHEND SPACE.
Because "breadth and length and depth and height" translated into our language of shorter definitions actually means space .
This last is the most strange.
How could the apostle Paul possibly KNOW that sanctity gives a new understanding of space?
The doctrine of the universe as boundless and without center or circumference, populated by innumerable worlds — Bruno's rejection of the closed Aristotelian sphere; the divine and the cosmos as ontologically infinite.
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 passage describes the 'duality of man' and 'eternal disharmony of soul and body' as the condition to be liberated from, which aligns with Ouspensky's concept of mechanical humanity.