Concerning Cosmic Consciousness by WL Wilmshurst.pdf

Concern i ing Cosm i ic

Consc i iousness

W . . L . . W i i l lmshurs t t

IT is rather to be assumed that a man who writes about

cosmic consciousness has undergone the experience in his

own person. Otherwise what should lead to his writing on

so strange and so abnormal an experience ? We are not,

however, entitled to assume that the individual who has

had the experience in question is necessarily capable of

writing a good book or even of writing convincingly on the

subject. Perhaps in a certain sense the outsider who has had

no such experience can write more dispassionately and

therefore with less bias on the nature of this strange

phenomenon.

The first edition of Dr. Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness *

(*Cosmic Consciousness. A Study in the Evolution of the

Human Mind. By Richard Maurice Bucke, M.D. American

Book Supply Company, Ltd., 149 Strand, London, W.C. 2.

305. net. New York : E. P. ' Dutton & Company, 681 Fifth

Avenue.) was published as long ago as 1901. The book has

been out of print some time, and the present edition has

been corrected and entirely reset throughout. It has, I

believe, the outstanding merit of being, whatever its defects,

the only comprehensive work on the subject in existence.

Dr. Bucke describes his own sensations when, at the

beginning of his thirty-sixth year, he met with this

experience. As this incident is the foundation stone of the

work in question and led to an entire change in the author's

whole mental and spiritual attitude, it is well to give an

account of it in his own words. It will be noted that, though

the account is his own, he writes of himself in the third

person.

It was in the early spring, at the beginning of his thirty-

sixth year. He and two friends had spent the evening

reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and

especially Whitman. They parted at midnight, and he had a

long drive in a hansom (it was in an English city). His mind,

deeply under the influence of the ideas, images and

emotions called up by the reading and talk of the evening,

was calm and peaceful. He was in a state of quiet, almost

passive, enjoyment. All at once, without warning of any

kind, he found himself wrapped around as it were by a

flame-coloured cloud. For an instant he thought of fire,

some sudden conflagration in the great city ; the next, he

knew that the light was within himself. Directly afterwards

came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense

joyousness accompanied, or immediately followed, by an

intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into

his brain streamed one momentary lightning-flash of the

Brahmic Splendour which has ever since lightened his life;

upon his heart fell one drop of Brahmic Bliss, leaving

thenceforward for always an aftertaste of heaven. Among

other things he did not come to believe, he saw and knew

that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence,

that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so

built and ordered that without any peradventure all things

work together for the good of each and all, that the

foundation principle of4:he world is what we call love, and

that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely

certain. He claims that he learned more within the few

seconds during which the illumination lasted than in

previous months or even years of study, and that he learned

much that no study could ever have taught.

This experience that has altered, in this and other similar

cases, the whole tenor of the percipient's outlook on life

appears, in its purer form, to have certain main

characteristics. The person affected realizes as never before

the oneness of the universe. He sees himself as part and

parcel of this unity which he senses as the expression of a

single conscious life. At the moment of the experience the

realization of the consciousness of the separateness of the

ego and the non-ego, the knower and the known, entirely

disappears. The man who has once had it is no longer able

to feel a shadow of doubt as to human immortality.

He knows it with a certainty that no argument or evidence

can strengthen or shake. Jesus presumably had this

experience on the Mount of Transfiguration, and the

Buddha writes over and over again as if he was familiar

with it, as for instance when he tells us how he attained

enlightenment under the Bodhi tree.

Among earlier mystics who have had kindred experiences

the case of St. Paul is probably the most familiar to readers,

though we should hardly be justified in affirming in either

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