The Works of Walter Leslie Wilmshurst
Brief Masonic Biography
The Meaning of Masonry
The Masonic Initiation
The Ceremony of Initiation
The Ceremony of Passing
Notes on Cosmic Consciousness
The Fundamental Philosophic Secrets Within Masonry
The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal
The Mystical Basis of Freemasonry
Reason and Vision
The Working Tools of an Old York Master
Spurious Ecstasy and Ceremonial Magic
Wilmshurst's Tracing Board of the Centre
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From the Occult Review March 1924
NOTES OF THE MONTH
Concerning Cosmic Consciousness
Contributed by W. L. Wilmshurst
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 of the two experiences
recorded of him that they were certainly instances of what might
strictly be termed cosmic consciousness, though perhaps the latter
one to which he alludes in a very cryptic manner may have been more
definitely of this nature. The first of these, it will be remembered,
was on the road to Damascus, when he was converted to Christianity,
and had a vision of the Christ and saw a great light which had the
effect of blinding him for some days afterwards. The other was many
years later, when he was caught up into the third heaven and heard,
as he says, "unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man
to utter."
The seeing of this great light is one of the phenomena which recur
again and again in these records, and seems to show that St. Paul's
first experience was at least akin to other phenomena of the kind.
We should perhaps associate with these experiences what has been
termed the Beatific Vision, which comes to the religious devotee
rather than to the mystical philosopher, and should (I would submit)
be regarded as a more personal phase of the same experience. It may
be that the beatific vision is in the nature of a realization of the
Higher Self or the Christ in man, while cosmic consciousness is in
the nature of an intuitive perception of the immanence of the Deity
in all manifested life, and the essential oneness of the Universal
Consciousness. According as the mind of the percipient is attuned by
his past life and spiritual outlook, so does he attain to either one
form of the experience or the other. Certainly the most noteworthy
records in early days, outside those which may be set down as of a
specifically religious character, are those recorded of the great
mystical philosopher Plotinus, of whose experiences in the matter
there is no suspicion of doubt. Plotinus was born AD. 204, and died
approximately at the age of seventy. His philosophic training and
ascetic life rendered him a peculiarly favourable subject for such an
experience. His ideas as to the true inwardness of the cosmic scheme
are beautifully expressed in the following passage :
There is a raying out of all orders of existence, an external
emanation from the ineffable One. There is again a returning impulse,
drawing all upwards and inwards towards the centre from whence all
came. Love, as Plato in the Banquet beautifully says, is child of
poverty and plenty. In the amorous quest of the soul after the Good
lies the painful sense of fall and deprivation. But that love is
blessing, is salvation, is our guardian genius; without it the
centrifugal law would overpower us and sweep our souls out far from
their source toward the cold extremities of the material and the
manifold. The wise man recognizes the idea of the Good within him.
This he develops by withdrawal into the place of his soul. He who
does not understand how the soul contains the beautiful within
itself, seeks to realize beauty without, by laborious production. His
aim should rather be to concentrate and simplify, and so to expand
his being; instead of going out into the manifold, to forsake it for
the One, and so to float upwards towards the divine fount of being
whose stream flows within him.
He asks how we can know the infinite, and replies that it cannot
be known by reason, but only by a faculty superior to this, which is
attained by entering into a state in which man has his finite sense
no longer, and in which the divine essence is communicated to him.
This, he says, is "ecstasy " and clearly by this
expression, "ecstacy" which really means standing outside
of oneself, Plotinus is referring to the phenomenon of cosmic
consciousness. For he adds, "When you thus cease to be finite,
you become one with the infinite." He also observes that this
sublime condition is not of permanent duration and it is only now and
then that it can be enjoyed. "I myself," he says, "have
realized it but three times as yet." He tells us that "all
that tends to purify and elevate the mind will assist us in this
attainment, and will facilitate the approach and recurrence of these
happy intervals."
Plotinus offers a philosophical justification for such
experiences. External objects, he tells us, present us only with
appearances. The problem of true knowledge, on the other hand, deals
with the ideal reality that exists behind these appearances. It
follows, therefore, that the religion of truth is not to be
investigated as a thing external to us, and so only imperfectly
known. Rather, it is within us. Truth, therefore, he maintains, is
not the agreement of our apprehension of an external object with the
object itself, but it is the agreement of the mind with itself.
Hence, he contends, knowledge has three degrees: opinions, science,
and illumination. The instrument of the first is sense, of the second
dialectic, and of the third intuition. This third is the absolute
knowledge founded on the identity of the mind knowing with the object
known.
We have little evidence bearing on this phenomenon between the
post-classical times of Plotinus and the later Middle Ages. In these
times, however, there are many noteworthy experiences recorded with
greater or less historical truth of the Catholic saints of that
period, conspicuous among whom may be named John Yepes, more commonly
known as St. John of the Cross, and St. Theresa, both of whose lives
date as recently as the sixteenth century AD St. John of the Cross
was born in 1542 and died in 1591. At the age of twenty-one he
adopted the religious habit of the Carmelite friars. In 1578 he was
imprisoned for some months for certain practices of a kind which were
regarded by the ecclesiastical authorities as unorthodox, and it was
during this period at the age of thirty-six that he had the
mysterious psychic experience which is identified by Dr. Bucke with
the phenomenon of cosmic consciousness, though it must be admitted
that the evidence with regard to its specific character is not
altogether conclusive. His biographer, David Lewis, gives the account
of it as follows :—
His cell became filled with light seen by the bodily eye. One
night the friar who kept him went as usual to see that his prisoner
was safe, and witnessed the heavenly light with which the cell was
flooded. He did not stop to consider it, but hurried to the prior,
thinking that some one in the House had keys to open the doors of the
prison. The prior, with two members of the order, went at once to the
prison, but on his entering the room through which the prison was
approached, the light vanished. The prior, however, entered the cell,
and, finding it dark, opened the lantern with which he had provided
himself, and asked the prisoner who had given him the light. St. John
answered him, and said that no one in the house had done so, that no
one could do it, and that there was neither candle nor lamp in the
cell. The prior made no reply and went away, thinking that the gaoler
had made a mistake.
St. John, at a later time, told one of his brethren that the
heavenly light, which God so mercifully sent him, lasted the night
through, and that it filled his soul with joy and made the night pass
away as if it were but a moment. When his imprisonment was drawing to
its close he heard our Lord say to him, as it were out of the soft
light that was around him, "John, I am here; be not afraid ; I
will set thee free." A few moments later, while making his
escape from the prison of the monastery, it is said that he had a
repetition of the experience, as follows :—
He saw a wonderful light, out of which came a voice, "Follow
me." He followed, and the light moved before him towards the
wall which was on the bank, and then, he knew not how, he found
himself on the summit of it without effort or fatigue. He descended
into the street, and then the light vanished. So brilliant was it,
that for two or three days afterwards, so he confessed at a later
time, his eyes were weak, as if he had been looking at the sun in its
strength. '•
Elsewhere St. John of the Cross refers to his own spiritual
experiences in language which suggests that these were of a similar
character to those already recorded. But his language is vague, and
deliberately so, as he says that his description of his experience
"relates to matters so interior and spiritual as to baffle the
powers of language. All I say," he continues, "falls far
short of that which passes in this intimate union of powers of the
soul with God. ... I stood enraptured in ecstasy beside myself, and
in every sense no sense remained. My spirit was endowed with
understanding, understanding not, all knowledge transcending. . . .
He who really ascends so high annihilates himself and all his
previous knowledge seems ever less and less."
St. Theresa's mystical experiences, as is well known, were legion.
They included the stigmata, i.e., the imprint of the five wounds of
the Crucifixion, levitation, clairvoyance, clairaudience, etc. She,
too, had an experience which she terms the "orison of union,"
which corresponds closely by its description to cosmic consciousness.
In this orison of union [says St. Theresa], the soul is fully
awake as regards God, but wholly asleep as regards things of this
world, and in respect of herself. During the short time the union
lasts she is as it were deprived of every feeling, and even if she
would she could not think of any single thing. Thus she needs to
employ no artifice in order to assist the use of her understanding.
In short, she is utterly dead to the things of the world, and lives
solely in God. . . . Thus does God when He raises the soul to union
with Himself suspend the natural action of all faculties. But this
time is always short, and it seems even shorter than it is. God
establishes Himself in the interior of this soul in such a way that
when she returns to herself it is wholly impossible for her to doubt
that she has been in God and God in her. This truth remains so
strongly impressed on her that even though many years should pass
without the condition returning, she can neither forget the favour
she received nor doubt of its reality. If you ask how it is possible
that the soul can see and understand that she has been in God, since
during the union she has neither sight nor understanding, I reply
that she does not see it then, but that she sees it clearly later
after she has returned to herself, not by any vision but by a
certitude which abides with her and which God alone can give her.
Reverting to the same experience on another occasion, St.Theresa
recounts how one day it was granted to her to perceive in one instant
how all things are seen and contained in God.
" I did not" she adds, "perceive them in their
proper form, and nevertheless the view I had of them was of a
sovereign clearness and has remained vividly impressed upon my soul.
This view was so subtile and delicate that the understanding cannot
grasp it"
Jacob Boehme is another classic example of this experience. His
first illumination occurred in the year 1600, when he was twenty-five
years of age, and he had a further and more vivid experience ten
years later. Martensen describes Boehme's first experience as follows
:—
Sitting one day in his room his eyes fell upon a burnished pewter
dish, which reflected the sunshine with such marvellous splendour
that he fell into an inward ecstasy, and it seemed to him as if he
could now look into the principles and deepest foundation of things.
He believed that it was only a fancy, and in order to banish it from
his mind he went out upon the green. But here he rmarked that he
gazed into the very heart of things, the very herbs and grass, and
that actual nature harmonized with what he had inwardly seen. He said
nothing to anyone, but praised and thanked God in silence. He
continued in the honest practice of his craft, was attentive to his
domestic affairs, and was on terms of good-will with all men. Of his
complete illumination ten years later he says himself :
The gate was opened to me that in one quarter of an hour I saw and
knew more than if I had been many years together at a university, at
which I exceedingly admired and thereupon turned my praise to God for
it. For I saw and knew the being of all things, the byss and the
abyss and the eternal generation of the Holy Trinity, the descent and
the original of the world and of all creatures through the divine
wisdom: I knew and saw in myself all the three worlds, namely, (i)
the divine (angelical and paradisaical) ; and (2) the dark (the
original of the nature to the fire), and then (3) the external and
the visible world (being a procreation or external birth from both
the internal and the spiritual worlds). And I saw and knew the whole
working essence, in the evil and the good and the original and the
existence of each of them; and likewise how the fruit-bearing womb of
eternity brought forth. So that I not only did greatly wonder at it
but did also exceedingly rejoice.
Of men belonging to our modern world who have had the experience
of cosmic consciousness, two only seem to my mind absolutely valid
instances. One is Edward Carpenter, the author of Towards
Democracy, a work of great breadth and insight, with which every
reader of this magazine should make himself familiar if he has not
already done so, and James Alien, the author of From Poverty to
Power, As a Man Thinketh, and many other booklets which may be
characterized as essays on the spiritual life. Edward Carpenter has
himself stated that he had this experience, and in fact intimated as
much in a letter to Dr. Bucke himself.
I really do not feel [he says in this letter] that I can tell you
anything without falsifying and obscuring the matter. I have done my
best to write it out in Towards Democracy. I had no experience
of physical light in this relation. The perception seems to be one in
which all the senses unite into one sense, in which you become the
object, but this is unintelligible mentally speaking. I do not think
the matter can be defined as yet, but I do not know that there is any
harm in writing about it. Elsewhere, in Civilization: Its Cause
and Cure, he writes more definitely on the subject:
There is in every man a local consciousness connected with his
quite external body. That we know. Is there not also in every man the
making of a universal consciousness? That there are in us phases of
consciousness which transcend the limit of the bodily senses is a
matter of daily experience. That we perceive and know things which
are not conveyed to us by the bodily eyes and heard by our bodily
ears is certain. That there arise in us waves of consciousness from
those around us, from the people, the race to which we belong, is
also certain. May there not then be in us the makings of a perception
and knowledge which shall not be relative to this body which is here
and now, but which shall be good for all time and everywhere? Does
there not exist in truth, as we have already hinted, an inner
illumination of which what we call light in the outer world is the
partial expression and manifestation, by which we can ultimately see
things as they are, beholding all creation, not by any local act of
perception, but by a cosmical intuition and prescience, identifying
ourselves with what we see? Does there not exist a perfected sense of
hearing as of the morning stars singing together, an understanding of
the words that are spoken all through the universe, the hidden
meaning of all things, a profound and far-pervading sense of which
our ordinary sense of sound is only the first novitiate and
intuition?
Mr. Carpenter refers elsewhere to "that inner vision which
transcends sight as far as sight transcends touch" and to "a
consciousness in which the contrast between the ego and the external
world and the distinction between subject and object fall away."
These are surely the words of one who has himself undergone this
experience. Carpenter, however, is careful to warn us that we are not
to suppose that people who have this experience are in any way to be
regarded as infallible as to its exact meaning. "In many cases
indeed" he remarks, "the very novelty and strangeness of
the experience may give rise to phantasmal trains of delusive
speculation"
In further interpretation of this mystery he observes that the
whole body is only as it were one organ of the cosmic consciousness.
"To attain this latter one must have the power of knowing
oneself separate from the body, of passing into a state of ecstasy,
in fact. Without this, cosmic consciousness cannot be experienced."
It is perhaps well that Mr Edward Carpenter has written of the matter
so definitely and from such an aloof and impersonal standpoint as he
has done, as those who have experienced the state have, as a rule,
been both too reserved with regard to their spiritual experiences and
too deficient in the critical faculty to give us anything that would
appear to the ordinary mind as a satisfactory explanation of the
phenomenon. We have nothing, for instance, in writing, from Mr James
Alien, who claims to have had the experience more than once, which
would throw any intimate light on what he saw and felt in connection
with it, though it leaves its trace, as it must ever do, on his own
standpoint in life, and on all that he has written. Mr Alien claimed
to have had this experience in the first instance at 24, an unusually
early age, while later on it returned after an interval of ten years
in, as he says, a more permanent form.
In three modern poets — Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Walt
Whitmans - there are suggestions which point to some experience of
the kind, and Walt Whitman especially, in his Leaves of Grass,
has expressed in singularly beautiful phraseology the mental attitude
which we associate with the transmutation of the individual life by
this mystical experience.
The lines written by Wordsworth on Tintern Abbey, in his
twenty-ninth year, are again singularly apposite as an expression of
the mental state to which cosmic consciousness serves as the portal.
In these he speaks of
. . . That blessed mood
In which the burden of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary
weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened : that serene and
blessed mood
In which the affections gently lead
us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal
frame
And even the motion of our human
blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul ;
While with an eye made quiet by the
power
Of harmony, and the deep power of
joy,
We see into the life of things.
Further lines in the same poem suggest the occurrence of an actual
personal experience in this connection, and we should perhaps be
right if we classed this poet (albeit with some hesitancy) along with
the others given in these Notes as one of those who actually entered
into this state of higher consciousness, who have been put en rapport
with the unity of all created life, and have seen "with the
bodily eye " and not in any mere poetical vision, "the
light that never was on land or sea." Thus hewrites once more :
I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the
joy
Of elevated thought; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply
interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of
setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living
air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of
man—
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of
all thought,
And rolls through all things.
Tennyson's verse again is steeped in a mysticism the depth of
which the ordinary reader, and indeed the critic as well, have been
too slow to appreciate. The author of Cosmic Consciousness himselt
speaks of this poet far too deprecatingly and must, I am afraid, be
numbered with those who fail to gauge his true greatness, and the
inwardness of what he wrote. The whole conception underlying the
verses on the Holy Grail is steeped in mystical insight, and the
thought of the deep reality underlying the entire phantasmagoria of
the phenomenal world is seldom far absent from the poet's thought.
The following lines from The Holy Grail may be given as an
instance, but they are only one example out of many :
Let the visions of the night, or of
the day
Come as they will ; and many a time
they come,
Until this earth he walks on seems
not earth,
This light that strikes his eyeball
is not light,
This air that smites his forehead is
not air,
But vision—yea his very hand
and foot—
In moments when he feels he cannot
die,
And knows himself no vision to
himself,
Nor the high God a vision, nor that
one
Who rose again; ye have seen what ye
have seen.
Again in The Ancient Sage, as many readers will recall, he
relates how
. . . 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 touch'd 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.
This is admittedly the record of a personal experience and is
referred to as such in the poet's Life by his son, the present Lord
Tennyson.
Dr. Bucke gives many instances in his work of men who, in his
view, have experienced cosmic consciousness in some form or other,
but by the critical mind many of these can hardly be regarded as
legitimate. Among these may be mentioned Mohammed, whose illumination
might be defended by some, but who to my thinking rather appears to
have written the Koran in much the same way as Madame Blavatsky wrote
Isis Unveiled, and whom I should class rather as a natural
medium in this respect than as a real illuminate. Dante is again
another instance given, with regard to whom, however, conclusive
evidence is lacking. The Bacon and Shakespeare controversy is
introduced rather unfortunately into the present work, from which it
would be well, I cannot help thinking, that such fantastic and
irrelevant controversies were omitted. Several of the instances given
in the present Notes do not appear at all. No woman is named among
the subjects of this experience. I myself have instanced St Theresa,
and among the moderns in this connection Anna Kingsford, an
illuminate of a very different type, should not be overlooked.
Probably at the present time, though Dr. Bucke cites only the case
of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, this experience is more common among the
saints and ascetics of India than in any other part of the world. A
training which lends itself naturally to the production of such
phenomena is the well-known yoga discipline, the goal of which is the
attainment of samadhi, a state near akin to, if not practically
identical with, that known in the West as cosmic consciousness.
Dr. Bucke claims that the cases of cosmic consciousness are
steadily increasing as the world grows older, and this may well be
so, but the instances chosen by him are not unfrequently so
capricious, while other important ones are omitted, that the list he
gives in support of his contention will hardly carry conviction, more
especially as only one is given from India. In Dr. Bucke's opinion
there is a steady development of sentient life from that simple
consciousness which is possessed by the higher types of the animal
kingdom, onward to the self-consciousness which, together with the
use of language, is the differentiating characteristic of mankind,
right up to that cosmic consciousness which he holds will be, in eons
to come, the heritage of all alike. By that time it may be supposed
mankind will have developed a more spiritual type of body and nervous
organization which will be permanently responsive to influences which
to-day reach only the rarest types of humanity in occasional and
evanescent flashes. |