Tertium Organum

void 
and 
darkness. 
The mysterious deity 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 
* Annie Besant, 
The Ancient Wisdom, 
Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, 
1939, Introduction. 

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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. 
Moments of 'sensation of infinity' are connected with quite special emotions. 
In 'theosophical' literature and in books on occultism it is often said that, passing 
into the 'astral' world man begins to see 
new colours, 
colours which are not in the solar 
spectrum.* This symbolism of the new colours of the 'astral sphere' conveys precisely 
the thought about the 
new emotions 
which a man begins to experience together with 
the sensations of an expanded consciousness - 'the ocean being absorbed by a drop'. 
This is the 'incredible bliss' of which mystics speak, the 
heavenly light
which the saints 
'see', the 'new sensations' which poets experience. Even conversational psychology 
connects 'ecstasy' with completely unusual 
new 
sensations, inaccessible and unknown 
to man in ordinary life. 
This sensation of 
light
and infinite joy is experienced in moments of expansion of 
consciousness (the unfolding of the 
mystic lotus
of the Indian Yogi), at the moment of 
the sensation of infinity which produces, at the same time, the sensation of darkness 
and boundless terror. 
What does it mean? 
How to reconcile the sensation of light with the sensation of darkness, the sensation 
of joy with the sensation of terror? Can it be simultaneous? Does it happen 
simultaneously? 
It does happen and it has got to be so. Mystical literature gives us examples of this. 
The simultaneous sensation of light and darkness, joy and terror seems to symbolize 
the strange duality and contradiction of human life. It can happen to a man who is very 
sharply divided, with one side of his nature gone far into the 'spirit' and the other side 
deeply sunk in 'matter', i.e. in illusion, in unreality; with too profound a faith in the 
reality of the unreal. 
* Although it must be remembered that we see