Cosmic Consciousness by Richard Maurice Bucke - Read the Complete Text for free at NewThoughtLibrary.com

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Richard Maurice Bucke's

Cosmic Consciousness

Book page numbers, along with the number to the left of the .htm extension match the page numbers of the original books to ensure easy use in citations for research papers and books

Self and Symbol - Argument - The New Birth / What It Is - Man's Relations to God and His Fellow Men - Areas of Consciousness - Self-ness / Selflessness - Instances of Illumnination and its After Effects - Examples of Cosmic Consciousness - Moses, the Law-Giver - Gautama, the Compassionate - Jesus of Nazareth - Paul of Tarsus - Mohammed - Emanuel Swedenborg - Emerson, Tolstoi, Balzac - Tolstoi - Balzac - Illumination as Expressed In the Poetical Temperament - Methods of Attainment: The Way of Illumination - Contents -

stages, and will, by the inexorable law of survival, be discontinued--discarded, even as the properties and stage-settings of a drama are thrown aside, when the play has been "taken off the boards."

It is admitted, therefore, that those forms of life having the power of locomotion, involve a more complex degree of consciousness, than does that of the mineral or vegetable.

In that phase of life that we see possessing the power to move, to change its immediate environment, even though not capable of changing its habitat we may perceive the beginning of that consciousness expressed as "free-will." Here, we assume, the organism recognizes its self as distinct from its environment, and from its counterparts, etc., but this recognition has not sufficient consciousness to assert that recognition, and so we say that there is no self-consciousness. There is what occultists have agreed to call simple consciousness, but this does not include a realization of identity, as apart from environment. This may be better understood if we separate these degrees or phases of consciousness into groups, applicable to the human organism, leaving, for a time the consideration of whether or not some human specimens are higher in the scales than are some animals.

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