Cosmic Consciousness (Arkana S.)

Rating:
Summary: An all-time classic
Review: Although now a century old, Dr. Bucke's volume is timeless because its topic is: the human quest for the experience of The Divine.

Written, not by a theologian but by an experiencer of the Ultimate Mystical Experience, this book describes Bucke's own few seconds of illumination, then goes on to show commonalities among the experiences of the ancient (Lao Tse, Buddha, Christ, Paul, Muhammad, etc.), medieval-renaissance (Dante, Shakespeare, etc.), and modern (Ramakrishna, Whitman, etc). The intellectual credentials of this neurologist cause Bucke's work to stand head-and-shoulders above popular "New Age" mystic reports.

Be sure not to miss Bucke's description of his own experience (humbly buried in introductory notes), and don't get bored by reading his analytical sections on the nature of consciousness. Dive into the excerpts of how writers have struggled through the ages to express their inexpressible experiences of Divine Love, Brahmic Ecstasy, Rapture... variously named in different times and cultures.

Although women are under-represented (naturally, since for millenia they've largely been barred from authorship), some of the most movingly personal experiences are those near the end of the volume by three 19th Century women.

The power of this gem stems from its first-hand reports of enlightenment - with its unpredictable, highly personal expressions. You'll find God experienced here not as an anthropomorphic Jehovah, but as a living Presence; not sterilized by intellectual analysis, but revered in Its humanity-divinity. Most helpfully, Bucke shows the parallels between different saints/illuminati/authors in their experiences and in their ways of describing it.

I tell my students that if they were to be sentenced to live out the rest of their lives on a desert island with only five books: Make this one of the five!

Rating:
Summary: Took the initiative to explore a vital topic
Review: Dated as it may seem to some (but not as dated as the moral prejudices of this time will seem in 500 years), this book takes a nerdy approach to the cases of high intelligence encountered by an author. He writes about people who have combined the process of genius with spiritual experience.

Like most systems of ideals, this work states that one way of doing things is preferable in a certain context, and therefore explores that ideal almost exclusively. In this view, intelligence is linear at some level of sampling, and thus can/should be considered a resource whose conclusions upon epistemological and metaphysical questions are of a higher grade and therefore, more likely correct.

To this reader, the conclusion appeared to be a generalized conception of naturalism in a Jungian or Nietzschean sense, an absolutism of materialism matching a non-dualistic worship of nature and her amoral methods. In this, it is consistent of my observations of the intelligent people I've known in this life: they tend to be "positive" nihilists and have some understanding of lust, hatred, love and passion.

The book itself made for quick reading, with a sharply human sense of pacing in which concepts are presented at medium pace and then accelerated through conclusions which keep in mind the ambiguity present in even the best science. Thus it styles itself as a conjecture, but providing anecdotal experience and some references to other works of the previous era, it makes a strong case without getting Socratic on us.

While those who are seeking entertainment reading may wish to avoid this, for others it is a useful piece in re-constructing a deconstructed human sense of reality, seeing how many aspects of spirituality are inherent and exist regardless of tradition, and how useful it is to pursue these rather than fighting over ecclesiastical formalizations.

Rating:
Summary: An illuminating study in the evolution of the human mind
Review: Dr. Bucke (1837-1902) penned this illuminating book as a study in the evolution of the human mind. It is still popular with New Thought students and immensely enjoyable for reference. His idol was Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. He explains the development of kinds of consciousness: color-sense, sense of fragrance and musical sense. He describes the experience of Illumination and Cosmic Consciousness with fascinating stories of the passage from self to cosmic consciousness of several people including Plotinus, Jesus, Buddha, Paul, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and many others. This was first published in 1901 and is still popular today.

Rating:
Summary: How Fortunate That We Have this Book In Print
Review: How fortunate that this book is in print! Despite the fact that I do not totally agree with Richard Bucke , the main ingredients of his analogy is extremely convincing! At this point of time, I rate this book as one that have changed my life as it changed my line of thought.

He illustrates and "evidently showed" that the great teachings of Buddha, Jesus, Mohammad, and other philosophers and poets, were the same. That the ultimate goal of Buddha's "Nirvana" and Jesus's "Kingdom of God" is in Bucke's language, "Cosmic Consciousness."

I will introduce this book to anyone who is frantically searching for Truth, as an addition to his library. To fellow mates who immerse themselves in the topics of metaphysics, mysticism, religion, and psychology. And to anyone else as a form of knowledge.

Richard Bucke's optimism gave hope to humanity and spirituality. I introduce his book alongside with Evenlyn Hill's Classic - "Mysticism" - for keen students of Christian Mysticism, although I truly believe that the communion with God does not exclude itself outside the circle of the aforementioned religion.

Rating:
Summary: The Live Sea Scrolls
Review: It's very difficult to do justice to a century-old book such as this one. Knowledge differs from Information in that it includes context. Do you rate a book in accordance with the context (e.g. time period in history) in which it was written? Or do you look at it from your own, present perspective? I'd do both. This book was, no doubt, an audacious breakthrough when it was published. It involved considerable work and thought. It is still THE definitive work on the subject--which says a lot. A few decades ago, I migh have given it 5 stars. But times change and people (hopefully) grow and mature. This book has quite a bit of breadth (though it tends to emphasize men vs. women, and West vs. East) but many of the thumbnail descriptions aren't too deep. This is part of the author's problem since descriptions of CC experiences tend to be short and far less than scientific. The whole book consists of these vignettes of various person's CC experiences (as decided by Bucke). Since it's not statistical, it is difficult to seriously accept Bucke's hypothesis that CC experiences are markedly increasing over time--though intuitively it is quite satisfying to do so. His parallel argument for the development of color in human seeing is fascinating. It needs a more scientific analysis though. But, he has opened an interesting field of study. Unfortunately, he also includes his own prejudices (rating Whitman as incredibly great, including few women in the book, and displaying ocnsiderable racial/color prejudice). The latter may, however, merely reflect the nature of his non-scientific study since records of African CC experiences were indubitably unavailable to him (and probably unavailable to us today). But that does NOT mean they didn't happen. Relying only on published material in the world of mystical experience is treading on thin ice. Further, descriptions of CC experiences are difficult since the experiences themselves are numinous and hard to define/describe. Nonetheless, Bucke has done us a great service in opening this topic to serious study (somewhat parallel to Gershom Scholem and Kabbalah). He's done more than others, per one of my favorite quotes:

"Once a week the road-sweeper came by with his brush. He was a friendly old fellow; and Miss Gidding at the Hollies, got into the habit all that summer of taking him a glass of lemonade and a slice of cake. He thanked her shyly, and that was all. But one evening there came a knock at the back door of the Hollies. The road-sweeper was there, a cauliflower in one hand and a bunch of sweet peas in the other. He seemed embarrassed as he said, "I've brought you these, ma'am, for your kindness." "Oh, you shouldn't," exclaimed Miss Gidding, 'It was nothing.' And then, the road-sweeper said an odd thing. 'Well, no,' he agreed, 'maybe it wasn't much, really ma'am. But it was more than anybody else did.'

from 500 Tales to Tell Again by H. L. Gee London Epworth Press quoted by Jacob Braude in New Treasury of Stories for Every Speaking and Writing Occasion Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice-Hall Inc June 1961, page 161.

Rating:
Summary: A Fascinating Study of Parallels
Review: Richard Maurice Bucke was a superintendant for a Canadian mental hospital, a medical doctor, and, most famously, Walt Whitman's friend, doctor, first biographer, and literary executor. It's in his connection with Whitman, and William James, that I first came to this fascinating study that reveals a great deal not only about a particular kind of religious phenomena, but of Bucke's attempt to make sense of and provide context for his own mystical experience.

The science of "Cosmic Consciousness" is pure late-1890's, and has some uncomfortable Victorian assumptions (about the relative "development" of the races, for instance): but what is really fascinating is Bucke's drive to find parallels in texts and biographies. From his own experience (to be found in James' _Varieties_, a pattern emerges that he finds spread throughout history.

Bucke's almost literal worship of Whitman (upon Whitman's death, Bucke wrote to a fellow friend of Whitman that "the Christ has died again") will likely strike readers as somewhere between touching and ridiculous, as might Bucke's evolutionary / materialist explanatory structure. But for the student of mysticism, Bucke's novel approach, (freeing the study of religious experience from religion, as it were, and presenting parallels to speak for themselves) will show itself to have been very influential indeed: from William James' seminal religious psychology to Freud to a thousand "new age" texts, Bucke this book (never long out of print since its original publication) has influenced the direction of the studies that came after.

Rating:
Summary: The pioneering book on enlightenment episodes
Review: This study is from the early days of the psychiatric profession when its practitioners could still write seriously of spiritual and mystical matters without being ostracised or ridiculed as "unscientific." Briefly, the author personally experienced a sudden episode of enlightenment and rapture that, while it was only of brief duration, changed his outlook on life forever. He spent the rest of his life, he was in his mid-thirties at the time, trying to figure out what had happened to him, and if there were any others.
What he found was that such sudden occurances of enlightenment, these epiphanies, had been occuring to mystics, philosophers, writers, and artists all through recorded history. Not only that, but they were occuring with increased frequency as time went on. Bucke concluded that this marked an evolutionary trend. Carried out to its logical conclusion, he postulated that one day "cosmic consciousness" as he termed it, would be as common in the human race as self consciousness currently is. He based this on the manner in which the ancestors of man slowly climbed from the simple consciousness of animals to an almost universal state of self consciousness.
Having experienced a simular event in my mid-thirties (remember, it happens to varying degrees), I found this book to be immensely personally relevant- as it has proven to be to many of us for over one hundred years now.

Rating:
Summary: MUCH FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Review: What is remarkable about this book is that it is one of the first to consider religious illumination from a psychological perspective. It differs from William James's Varieties of Religious Experience in that many of Bucke's opinions (e.g. his views on socialism) have been proved wrong by time and has dated. In order to judge it objectively, one ought thus to always keep the era in which it was written in mind.

The basic point is that the human race is slowly and sporadically - albeit with increasing speed - developing a new consciousness, one that is substantially more advanced than the normal human consciousness, and one that will eventually lift the species above the fear, ignorance and brutality that has plagued mankind throughout its history.

Bucke's argument is based on analogy. He points out the three phases of consciousness found among living creatures: perception amongst lower animals, receptual consciousness amongst higher animals and the conceptual thinking of human beings, that is accompanied by a strong sense of self.

In a very interesting chapter he demonstrates the development of consciousness over the last couple of millennia by referring to mankind's increasing refinement in distinguishing different colors. Initially only black and red were differentiated, but what was perceived as "red" has been refined into red, orange, yellow and white and even further. Likewise with "black" which split up into black and blue-green, from which the separate colors blue and green were again discerned:
"The blazing blue of the oriental sky is not mentioned in Homer or the Bible, nor in the Rig Veda or the Zend Avesta. But in this present century we know not only the seven primitive colours, but literally thousands of different shades and gradations of them."

Bucke argues that new or enhanced senses originate with sporadic manifestations among a minority of human beings and that a new consciousness eventually spreads through the whole population. The new, or fourth level of consciousness, which will enable mankind to perceive the unity of the cosmos and the divine presence inherent in it, that will liberate humanity from fear and that will enable the race to perceive that love is the rule and the basis of the universe, is what is called cosmic consciousness. Bucke predicts that cosmic consciousness will ultimately be the norm amongst the majority of people.

No reader will agree with all the author's points, but some of his great contemporaries like the scientist and philosopher Ouspensky agreed to such an extent that he devoted an entire chapter in his work Tertium Organum to this book. The response of psychologist William James in a letter to Bucke was: "My total reaction on your book, my dear Sir, is that it is an addition to psychology of first rate importance, and that you are a benefactor to us all."

Bucke considers the greatest teachers, artists and religious thinkers by looking at their teaching and what is known about their lives, and points out the remarkable correspondences. Some of those discussed in detail include Gautama, Jesus, Paulus, Plotinus, Mohammed, Dante, St. Jan of the Cross, Francis Bacon, Jacob Behmen, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Lao Tse, Socrates, Benedict Spinoza, Swedenborg, Emerson, Thoreau and Ramakrishna Paramahansa.

His arguments are persuasive, as far as both the comparison of texts and the similarities in the numinous experiences of the individuals are concerned. As such, the book also serves as a brilliant study of the nature of the mystical experience that is exactly the same in all the religious traditions.

He concludes that these individuals were the pioneers who had already entered cosmic consciousness and wished to convey its essence to the rest of humanity. They were, however, restricted to use the language of normal consciousness and that is why their revelations appear to be incomplete and even deceptive:
"It would be beyond the power of the self conscious mind to conceive the cosmic conscious world. This being so, the reports made by these spiritual travelers have been not only not understood but misunderstood in an infinite variety of senses, and the essentially similar account given by for example, Paul, Mohammed, Dante, Jesus, Gautama and others, has been looked upon as a variety of accounts, not of the same, but of diverse things. A critical study of all these (seeming) diverse accounts will show that they are more or less unsuccessful attempts to describe the same thing. But because it was out of the power of the original reporter, the seer, to give anything like a full and clear account of what he saw, largely because of the inadequacy of the language belonging to the self conscious mind; because his reporters again (as in the cases of Jesus and Gautama, who did not write), possessing only self consciousness, blurred still further the picture; because translators, possessing only self consciousness and understanding only imperfectly what the teacher wished to convey, still further distorted the record. For all these reasons the important fact of the unity of the teachings of these men has been very generally overlooked; hence the confusion and the so-called mystery; a misunderstanding unavoidable, no doubt, under the circumstances, but which will one day, assuredly, be cleared up."

Bucke's work deserves its "classic" status and may be appreciated even more when read together with William James' aforementioned work, plus Stephan Hoeller's brilliant book "The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead."

Rating:
Summary: Be careful which edition you buy.
Review: When one loses a child, as both Bucke and I have, I think opening one's eyes to a cosmic sense of consciousness at least helps put the incomprehensible into a more tolerable perspective. Though anyone seeking a higher level of understanding of the vastness of the universe would benefit from Bucke's observations and insights, I would especially recommend this book for anyone struggling with the premature death of a loved one. Along with Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning," it gives the bereaved something more than the here and now to hold onto.