Attempts with the logic of the phenomenal world to penetrate in thought into the world beyond, the world of noumena, the world of causes, if they did not prove a complete failure or did not lead a man to the world of waking dreams, gave one result only. -Conscious of the new order of things man lost the sense of the reality of the old order. The visible world began to appear to him fantastic, unreal; everything vanished around him, disappeared like smoke, leaving a terrifying sensation of illusion. He felt in everything the abyss of infinity, and everything pouring away into this abyss.
The sensation of infinity is the first and most terrifying trial before initiation. There is nothing! The small insignificant soul feels itself suspended in an infinite void. Then even the soul itself ceases to exist. There is nothing - there is only infinity, the constant and continuous breaking up and dissolution of everything. In the mystical literature of all peoples there are references to this sensation of void and darkness.
The mysterious diety of the ancient Egyptians, mentioned in the Orphic myths was: 'The thrice-unknown darkness in contemplation of which all knowledge is resolved into ignorance.'
This means that, approaching the world of causes with nothing but the knowledge of the world of phenomena, with his own instrument of logic which proved futile because all the new eluded him, a man was bound to experience a terror surpassing all limits. In the new he felt as yet nothing but chaos, the old was vanishing, receding, becoming unreal. Terror and regret at the loss of the old was mingling with the fear of the new, the unknown, terrifying in its infinity.
At this stage a man goes through the same experience as that of an animal in becoming a man. After a momentary glimpse of the new world it is dragged back by life. The world it has glimpsed for a short moment seems a dream, a fantasy, a creation of its imagination. But the old world of the past is no longer the same either, it becomes narrow, there is no longer any room in it. The awakening consciousness can no longer lead the same wild and free life of a beast. It already knows something, hears some voices. And at the same time the body holds it. And it does not know where and how it can escape it or escape from itself.
A man on the threshold of the new world has exactly the same experience. He has heard the music of heaven, and the dull songs of the earth no longer touch or move him; or, if they do touch and move him, it is because they speak to him of heavenly sounds, of the unattainable, of the unknown. He has experienced a feeling of an extraordinary EXPANSION of consciousness, when for a moment everything was clear to him, and he cannot reconcile himself to the slow earthly working of the brain.
-Tertium Organum, P.D.Ouspensky, p217
I have to chuckle just a little because it is mainly scientist, "learned men" who are the most terrorised by infinity / the unknown. Ouspensky proceeds in the next few pages to say that any math or logic that works in the material world is wrong in the causal world, and vice verse, to such a point that many scientists would just say "burn the book! It is heresy!" and from a material point of view perhaps it is true.
I chuckle because people who haven't crammed so much "knowledge" into their brains, like natural living indigenous people, they are closer to clear understandings of spiritual matters like this.
In fact, in my research, it is well proven that EXACTLY WHAT IS MISSING in our great sciences, is the mindsets and ways of thinking that more natural people have, less 'cultured' and 'civilized' people are more in a natural sensability and can understand the unknown better than scientists.
I fully believe that science will embrace diverse and non-technical ways to think of the world if it wishes to gain any true insights. The first hurdle though, will be science stopping creating financial and opportunity inequity, next hurdle, only doing science that is good for the ecology. Then native type thinkers can be integrated into a TRUE SCIENCE. Amen! Looking forward to the day.
Love n light, Teo
Teo's presence: Givnology forums, freeboards, tradigital music, Third Millennium Thinking, new media
May we have enough compassion so that people with solutions for us all can bring them to us without fear
ig: 
