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 -

of their own name. This phenomenon is much less rare than is generally known.

In Tennyson's "Ancient Sage" this experience of entering into cosmic consciousness is thus described:

"More than once when I
Sat all alone, revolving in myself,
The word that is the symbol of myself,
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,
And passed into the nameless, as a cloud
Melts into heaven. I touched my limbs; the limbs
Were strange, not mine; and yet no shade of doubt,
But utter clearness, and thro' loss of self
The gain of such large life as matched with ours
Were sun to spark--unshadowable in words.
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world."

Tennyson's illumination is certain, clearly defined, distinct and characteristic, although his poems are much less cosmic than those of Whitman and of many others. There is, however, in the above, all that is descriptive of that state of consciousness which accompanies liberation from the illusion--the enchantment of the merely mortal existence.

Words are, as Tennyson fitly says, but "shadows of a shadow-world"; how then may we hope

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