We are told that the prophet repeatedly refuted the suggestion of his adoring followers that he was God himself come to earth.

"It is wonderful," says one of his commentators, "with his temptations, how great a humility was ever is, how little he assumed of all the godlike attributes men forced upon him. His whole life is one long argument for his loyalty to truth. He had but one answer for his worshippers, 'I am no more than a man; I am only human.' * * * He was sublimely confident of this single attribute that he was the messenger of the Lord of the daybreak, and that the words he spake came verily from him. He was fully persuaded that God had sent him to do a great work among his people in Arabia. Nervous to the verge of madness, subject to hysteria, given to wild dreaming in solitary places, his was a temperament that easily lends itself to religious enthusiasm."

While it may be argued that Mohammed did not possess cosmic consciousness in the degree of fullness which we find in the life of St. Paul, for example, we must take into consideration the temperament of the Arab, and the conditions under which he labored. But that he had attained a high degree of Illumination is beyond dispute. This fact is evidenced by the following salient points characteristic of cosmic consciousness: A fine sensitive, highly-strung organization; a deep and serious thoughtfulness, especially regarding the realities of life; an indifference to the call of personal ambition; love of solitude and the mental urge that demands to know the answer to life's riddle.

Following the time of illumination on Mount Hara we find Mohammed possessing a conviction of the truth of immortality and the goodness of God; we find him also with a wonderful power to draw people to him in loving service; and the irresistible desire to bring to his people the message of immortal life, and the necessity to look more to spiritual things than to the things of the flesh. Added to this, we find Mohammed changed from a shrinking, sensitive youth, given to much reflection and silent meditation, into a man with perfect confidence in his own mission and in his ultimate victory.



CHAPTER XII

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG

While the Swedenborgians, as a religious sect, are not numerically sufficient to be reckoned among the world's great religions, it is yet a fact that the followers of the great Swedish seer and scientist hold a prominent place among the innumerable sects which the beginning of this century finds flourishing.

Swedenborg was born in Stockholm, in January, 1688, and lived to the advanced age of eighty-four years.

Swedenborg was well born; he was the son of a bishop of the Swedish church, and during his lifetime held many positions of honor. He was a friend and adviser of the king, and his expert knowledge of mining engineering gave him a place among the scientists of his age.

He was a voluminous writer, his early work being confined to the phases of materialistic science, notably on mines and metals, and later upon man, in his physiological aspect.

His "De Cerebro and Psychologia Rationales," published in his fifty-seventh year, showed a different Swedenborg from the one to whom his colleagues were accustomed to refer with much respect.

This book dealt with man, not as a product of brute creation, but as an evolutionary creature, having at least a possibility of divine origin. It is, however, his "Arcana Coelestia" upon which "The Church of the New Jerusalem" is founded; and it is this work which caused Swedenborg's friends and colleagues to determine that he had become insane. It is, in fact, only within very recent years, that the so-called scientific world has deigned to regard Swedenborg's revelations with any degree of serious and respectful attention.

Swedenborg's Illumination was not, like that of so many others, who have founded a new religion, a sudden influx of spiritual consciousness, but rather a gradual leading up to the inevitable goal, by virtue of serious thought, deep study, and a high order of mentality.

But that the Swedish seer received, in full measure, the blessing of cosmic consciousness, is beyond doubt.

Swedenborg's extremely simple habits of life; his freedom from any desire for display, or for those social advantages into which he was born; his gentleness and unassuming manner, of which much is written by his followers, all point to him as one upon whom the blessing might readily descend. Swedenborg was a vegetarian, but this seems not to be a necessary characteristic of those possessing illumination, although, when cosmic consciousness shall have become almost general, vegetarianism must inevitably come with it, as animal life will disappear from the earth.

Swedenborg, like many others who have perceived the cosmic light, evidently believed that he had been specially selected and consecrated for the work of the new church. That is, he took his illumination, not as an initiation into the higher degrees of cosmic truth, but as a special and personal revelation. This view characterizes those who founded a new, or a reformed religious system, while as a matter of truth, the light that comes is a part of the cosmic plan, and not, as Swedenborg and others imagine, as a personal revelation.

However, Swedenborg considered himself a direct instrument in the hands of God, and God is alluded to as a personality. He believed that his great mission was to disclose the true nature of the Bible, and to prove that it was actually the inspired word of God, having an esoteric meaning, which has wrongly been interpreted to apply to the creation of a material world, and to its history and its people, but that when understood, it explains clearly, the nature of God, and the nature of man, and their relation to each other. It should be remembered that at the time Swedenborg wrote his theological works, the church had fallen into rank materialism and superstition. That Swedenborg should have received his illumination, or revelation, direct from the Lord, only serves to prove that the mortal consciousness clothes the revelation with whatever personality appeals to it, as having authority.

Thus, the angel Gabriel was the dictator in the case of Mohammed, and the "Blessed Mother" of the Hindu reveals to them the vision of mukti. Swedenborg says of his vision: "God appeared to me and said, 'I am the Lord God, the Creator and Redeemer of the world. I have chosen thee to unfold the spiritual sense of the Holy Scriptures. I will myself dictate to thee what thou shalt write.'"

In "The True Christian Religion," published shortly before his death he says: "Since the Lord can not manifest Himself in person as has been shown, and yet He has foretold that He would come and establish a new church, which is the New Jerusalem, it follows that He is to do it, by means of a man, who is able not only to receive the doctrines of this church with his understanding, but also to publish them by the press. That the Lord has manifested Himself before me, His servant, and sent me on this office, and that, after this, He opened the sight of my spirit, and thus let me into the spiritual world, and gave me to see the heavens and the hells and also to speak with spirits and angels, and this now continually for many years, I testify in truth; and also that, from the first day of that call, I have not received anything that pertains to the doctrines of that church from my angel, but from the Lord alone, while I read the Word."

It is stated with great positiveness by Swedenborg's followers, and indeed, apparently by the seer himself, if we may take as authoritative, the translations of his works, that the revelations accorded to him covered a period of many years, whereas, we find in most instances of cosmic consciousness, the illumined ones have alluded to some specific time, as the great event, even while claiming that the effect of this illumination remains indefinitely—in fact, forms a part of a wider area of consciousness which is ever increasing.

But when we take the numerous instances of revelations, in which the devout ones firmly believe that they and they alone have been accorded the vision, we must realize that this phenomenon is impersonal, looked at as a favor to any one human being. By that we mean that Illumination comes to every soul who has earned it, just as mathematically as the sun seems to set, after the earth has made its hourly journey.

Perhaps this comparison is not as clear as to say: when the normal child has grown to manhood or womanhood, his consciousness has widened, beyond that of the infant; not excluding that of the infant but inclusive of all hitherto acquired knowledge. Without in any degree lessening the importance and the verity of Swedenborg's visions, it may be assumed that his record of these visions and their meaning has partaken more or less of the limitations of mortal mind.

Spiritual consciousness can not be set down in terms of sense. The external world symbolizes spiritual truths; each interpreter must of necessity weave into his interpretation and attempt at finite expression of these truths, something of his own mortal consciousness; and this "mortal mind" consciousness is bound to partake of the time and age, and conditions of environment of the person who has experienced the revelation.

Making due allowance, therefore, for the impossibility of exact expression of any spiritual illumination, we find in the revelation of Swedenborg exactly what we find in all who have attained to cosmic consciousness, namely, the absolute, confidential assurance of immortal life: the conviction that creation is under divine love and wisdom, administered by Cosmic Law and order, or Justice, and the final "redemption" (i.e., evolution), of all men. In his "Conjugal Love," Swedenborg touches upon the premise which we declare, as the foundation of all cosmic consciousness, namely the attainment of spiritual union with the "mate" which we believe to be inseparable from all creation; the reunited principle which we see expressed in the male and female, whether in plant, bird, animal, man, or angel; the "twain made one" which Jesus declared would be the sign manual of the coming of his kingdom; that is, the coming of cosmic consciousness—the kingdom of pure and perfect love upon earth as it is in the heavens.

In Corinthians (11: 12) we read:

"For as the woman is of the man so is the man also of the woman; for the woman is not without the man, nor the man without the woman in the Lord."

Which is to say, that in the attainment of cosmic consciousness (in the Lord), the "twain are made one," and immortality (i.e., immunity from reincarnation) is gained, because of this union. God is a bi-sexual Being. This fact is evidenced throughout all creation. To attain to immortality is to become as God. In this day and age of the world we have come into a realization of the Father-Mother idea of godhood, clearly and literally signifying the coming consciousness which is bi-sexual; male and female; perfect counterparts, or complements and through which alone, this earth can be made a "fit dwelling place for gods." This, too, is the message of the great seer Swedenborg, as it relates to love, as it is, when rightly understood and interpreted, of all who have felt the blessing of perfection, as exemplified in Illumination.

The fundamental points of Swedenborg's doctrine agree with those of all other Illumined ones, who have founded a system of worship; a "Way of Illumination" it may be called; or in whose name such systems have been formed. That is, he testified to:

A conviction of immortality;

A realization of absolute justice, whereby all souls shall finally come into cosmic consciousness.

An actual time when Christ (the cosmic illumination) shall come to earth.

A great and abiding love for and patience with the frailties of his sense-conscious fellow-beings;

A transcendent desire to bestow upon all men, the blessing of cosmic consciousness.

Few if any, have ever attained a full and complete realization of cosmic consciousness and remained in the physical body.

Those who have attained and retained the highest degree of this glimpse of the Paradise of the gods, find it practically impossible to describe or explain the sensations experienced, even though they are more convinced of the truth and the reality of this realm than of anything in the merely sense-conscious life.

Lastly, let us not lose sight of the all-important fact that no one system, creed, philosophy, or way of Illumination will answer for all types and degrees of men. "All things work together for good" to those who have the keenness of vision which precedes the full attainment of cosmic consciousness, as well as to those who have grasped its full significance.

The characteristic evidence of the potentiality of the present era of the world, is preeminently that of a desire for unity.

This desire is expressed in all the avenues of external life; its inner meaning is obscured by commercialism and self-interest, as in trusts and labor unions, but it is there nevertheless—the symbol of the inner urge toward unity in consciousness.

It is found in efforts at Communism, and in allied reform movements. It is particularly evident in the breaking down of church prejudices. In these days a Catholic priest and a Jewish rabbi find it not only expedient but mutually helpful, to unite in the work of municipal reform; in the abolition of child labor; in all things that will bring a better state of existence into daily human life.

The business man uses the phrase "let us get together on this" without knowing that he is expressing in terms of sense-consciousness, the urge of his own and his fellow beings' inner mind, which senses the fact of our unescapable Brotherhood.

All religious systems then, are good, as are all systems of philosophy. They are good because they are an attempt at bringing into the perspective of the mortal mind the reality of the soul and the soul life; the rule of the spiritually conscious ego over the physical body in order that we may now, in our present incarnation, claim immortality.



CHAPTER XIII

MODERN EXAMPLES OF INTELLECTUAL COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS: EMERSON; TOLSTOI; BALZAC

Passing over the ancient philosophers, Aristotle, Albertus Magnus, Plotinus, Marcus Aurelius, Pascal, Socrates, Plato, Aspasia, and others, all of whom had glimpsed, if not fully attained, cosmic consciousness, we come to a consideration of those cases in our own day and age, in which this superior consciousness has found expression through intellectual rather than through religious channels.

Of these latter, no more illustrious example can be cited than that of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the sage of Concord.

Emerson's nature was essentially religious, but his religion was not of the emotional quality so often found among enthusiasts, and which is almost always openly expressed when this religious enthusiasm is not balanced by intellectuality.

Analysis is frequently a foe to inspiration, but there are fare instances where the intellect is of such a penetrating and extraordinary quality that it carries the power of analysis into the unseen; in fact what we habitually term the unseen is a part of the visible to this type of mind. True intellect is a natural inheritance, a karmic attribute. The spurious kind is the result of education, and it invariably has its limitations. It stops short of the finer vibrations of consciousness and denies the reality of the inner life of man—which inner life constitutes the real to the character of intellect that penetrates beyond maya.

Of such a quality of intellect is that exemplified in Emerson. No mere tabulator of facts was he, but a dissector of the causes back of all the manifestation which he observed and studied and classified with the mental power of a god.

Nor is there lacking ample proof that Emerson experienced the phenomenon of the suddenness of cosmic consciousness—a degree of which he seems to have possessed from earliest youth.

In his essay on Nature, we find these words:

"Crossing a bare common in snow puddles at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear."

Emerson here alluded to a feeling of fear, which seems to have been experienced during a certain stage by many of those who have entered into cosmic consciousness. This fear is doubtless due to the presence in the human organism of what we may term the "animal instinct," which is an inheritance of the physical body. This same peculiar phenomenon oppresses almost everyone when coming into contact with a new and hitherto untried force.

A certain lady, who relates her experience in entering into the cosmic conscious state, says: "A certain part of me was unafraid, certain, secure and content, at the same time my mortal consciousness felt an almost overwhelming sense of fear."

Continuing, Emerson says:

"All mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."

Emerson's powerful intellect would naturally describe such an experience in intellectual terms rather than, as in the instances heretofore recorded, in religious phraseology, but it must not be inferred that Emerson was less religious, in the true sense, than was Mohammed or St. Paul.

Emerson lived in an age when orthodoxy flourished, and he and his associates of the Transcendentalist cult, were regarded as non-religious, if not actually heretical. Therefore, it is that Emerson's keen intellect was brought to bear upon everything he encountered, not only in his own intimate experience but also in all that he read and heard, lest he be trapped into committing the error which he saw all about him, namely, of mistaking an accepted viewpoint as an article of actual faith. His way to the Great Light lay through the jungle of the mind, but he found the path clear and plain and he left a torchlight along the way.

Emerson fully recognized the illusory character of external life, and the eternal verity of the soul, as witness:

"If the red slayer thinks he slays, Or if the slain thinks he is slain, They know not well, the subtle ways, I keep and pass and turn again."

Horrible as is war, because of the spirit of hate and destruction it embodies and keeps alive, yet the fact remains that man in his soul knows that he can neither slay nor be slain by the mere act of destroying the physical shell called the body. It is inconceivable that human beings would lend themselves to warfare, if they did not know, as a part of that area of supra-consciousness, that there is a something over which bullets have no power.

This fact, regarded as a more or less vague belief to the majority, becomes incontrovertible fact to the person who has entered cosmic consciousness. His view is reversed, and where he formerly looked from the sense-conscious plane forward into a possible spiritual plane, he now gazes back over the path from the spiritual heights and sees the winding road that led upward to the elevation, much as a traveller on the mountain top looks back and for the first time sees all of the devious trail over which he has, climbed to his present vantage point. During the journey there had been many times when he could only see the next step ahead, and nothing but his faith in the assurance of his fellow men who had attained the summit of that mountain, could ever have sustained him through the perils of the climb, but once on the heights, his backward view takes in the details of the journey and sees not "through a glass darkly," but in the clear light of achievement.

Such is the effect of cosmic consciousness to the one who has seen the light.

"One of the benefits of a college education," says Emerson, "is to show the boy its little avail."

Does this imply that an unlettered mind is desirable? Not necessarily, but there is a phase of intellectual culture that is detrimental while it lasts.

It is as though one were to choke up a perfectly flowing stream which yielded the moisture to fertile lands, by filling the bed of the stream with rocks and sticks.

The flow of the spiritual currents becomes clogged by the activities of the mind in its acquisition of mere knowledge, and before that knowledge has been turned into wisdom. The same truth is expressed in the aphorism "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." It is dangerous because it chains the mind to the external things of life, whereas the totally unlettered (we do not use the term ignorant here) person will, if he have his heart filled with love, perceive the reality of spiritual things that transcend mere knowledge of the physical universe.

Beyond this plane of mortal mind-consciousness, which is fitly described as "dangerous," there is the wide open area of cosmic perception, which may lead ultimately to the limitless areas of cosmic consciousness. If, therefore, an education, whether acquired in or out of college, so whets the grain of the mind that it becomes keen and fine enough to realize that knowledge is valuable ONLY as it leads to real wisdom, then indeed it is a benefit; unless it does this, it is temporarily an obstruction.

Out of the lower into the higher vibration; out of sense-consciousness into cosmic consciousness; out of organization and limitations into freedom—the freedom of perfection, is the law and the purpose. This Emerson with his clearness of spiritual vision, saw, and this premise he subjected to the microscopic lens of his penetrating intellect. In his essay on Fate he says:

"Fate involves amelioration. No statement of the Universe can have any soundness which does not admit its ascending effort. The direction of the whole and of the parts is toward benefit. Behind every individual closes organization; before him opens liberty. * * * The Better; the Best. The first and worse races are dead. The second and imperfect races are dying out, or remain for the maturing of higher. In the latest race, in man, every generosity, every new perception, the love and praise he extorts from his fellows, are certificates of advance out of fate into freedom."

This phrase, "out of fate into freedom," may be read to mean, literally, out of the bondage of the sense-conscious life which entails rebirth and continued experience, into the light of Illumination which makes us free.

Further commenting, Emerson says:

"Liberation of the will from the sheaths and clogs of organization which he has outgrown is the end and aim of the world * * * The whole circle of animal life—tooth against tooth, devouring war, war for food, a yelp of pain and a grunt of triumph, until at last the whole menagerie, the whole chemical mass, is mellowed and refined for higher use * * *"

The sense of unity which is so inseparable from the cosmic conscious state, was always uppermost in Emerson's mind. Neither did he ever present as unity that state of consciousness that may be termed organization-consciousness—group-consciousness it is often called. He realized that the person who stands for Individualism is much more than apt to recognize his indissoluble relationship with the Cosmos. A perception of unity is a complement of Individualism.

That which, in modern metaphysical phraseology, is best termed "The Absolute," was expressed by Emerson as the Over-Soul, and this term meant something much greater, more unescapable than the anthropomorphic God of the church-goers. His assurance of unity with this Divine Spiritual Essence was perfect. It savors more of what is termed the religious view of life than of the philosophic, but we contend that in the coming era of the cosmic conscious man, all life will be religious, in the true sense, and that there will be no dividing line between philosophy and worship, because worship will consist of living the life of the spiritual man, and not in any set forms or rites. Bearing upon this we find Emerson saying:

"Not thanks, not prayer, seem quite the highest or truest name for our communion with the infinite—but glad and conspiring reception—reception that becomes giving in its turn as the receiver is only the All-Giver in part and in infancy. I cannot—nor can any man—speak precisely of things so sublime, but it seems to me the wit of man, his strength, his grace, and his tendency, his art, is the grace and the presence of God. It is beyond explanation. When all is said and done, the rapt saint is found the only logician. Not exhortation nor argument becomes our lips, but paeans of joy and praise. But not of adulation; we are too nearly related in the deep of the mind to that we honor. It is God in us that checks the language of petition by a grander thought. In the bottom of the heart it is said, 'I am and by me, O child, this fair body and world of thine stands and grows; I am, all things are mine; and all mine are thine.'"

We could quote passages from the essays ad infinitum, showing conclusively that the cosmic conscious plane had been attained and retained by this great philosopher—one of the first of the early part of the century, which has been prophesied as the beginning of the first faint lights of the Dawn, but enough has been offered for our present purpose, that of establishing the salient points of the cosmic conscious man or woman, which points are the complete assurance of the eternal verity and indestructibility of the soul; of its ultimate and inevitable victory over maya or the "wheel of causation"; and the joyousness and the sense of at-one-ness with the universe, which comes to the illumined one, bespeaking an unquenchable optimism and an utter destruction of the sense of sin—points which characterize all who have attained to this supra-conscious state of Being.

These points are all expressed repeatedly in all Emerson's utterances and mark him as one of the most illumined philosophers, as he was one of the greatest intellects of the last century, or of any other century.

LEO TOLSTOI: RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHER

A strange, lonely and wonderful figure was Tolstoi, novelist, philosopher, socialist, artist and reformer.

Great souls are always lonely souls, estimated by sense-conscious humans. In the midst of the so-called pleasures and luxuries of the senses, a wise soul appears as barren of comfort as is a desert of foliage.

Without the divine optimism that comes from soul-consciousness, such a one could not endure the life of the body: without the absolute assurance that comes with cosmic consciousness, men like the late Count Tolstoi must needs die of soul-loneliness.

From early childhood up to the time of his Illumination Tolstoi indulged in seriousness of thought. Like Mohammed, great and overpowering desire to fathom the mystery of death took possession of him. He was ever haunted by an excessive dread of the "darkness of the grave," and in his essay, "Childhood," he describes with that wonderful realism, which characterizes all his works, the effect on a child's mind of seeing the face of his dead mother. This may be taken in a sense as biographical, although it is not probable that Tolstoi here alludes to the death of his own mother as she died when he was too young to have remembered. He describes the scene in the words of Irteniev:

"I could not believe that this was her face. I began to look at it more closely, and gradually discovered in it the familiar and beloved features. I shuddered with fear when I became sure that it was indeed she, but why were the closed eyes so fallen in? Why was she so terribly pale, and why was there a blackish mark under the clear skin on one cheek?"

A terror of death, and yet a haunting urge that compelled him to be forever thinking upon the mystery of it, is the dominant note in every line of Tolstoi's writings up to the time which he describes as "a change" that came over him.

For example, when Count Leo was in his 33d year, his brother Nicolai died. Leo was present at the bedside and described the scene with the utmost frankness regarding its effect upon his mind; and again we note that awful fear and hopeless questioning which characterizes the sense-conscious man whose intellect has been cultivated to the very edge of the line which separates the self-conscious life from the cosmic conscious.

This questioning, with the fear and dread and terror of death and of the "ceaseless round of births" and the cares and sorrows of existence was what drove Prince Siddhartha from his father's court and Mohammed into the mountains to meditate and pray until the answer came in the light of illumination.

It came to Tolstoi through the very intensity of his powers of reason and analysis; through the sword-like quality of mental urge—a much more sorrowful path than the one through the simple way of love and service and prayer.

His comments upon the death of his brother give us a vivid idea of the state of mind of the Tolstoi of that age:

"Never in my life has anything had such an effect upon me. He was right (referring to his brother's words) when he said to me there is nothing worse than death, and if you remember that death is the inevitable goal of all that lives, then it must be confessed that there is nothing poorer than life. Why should we be so careful when at the end of all things nothing remains of what was once Nicolai Tolstoi? Suddenly he started up and murmured in alarm: 'What is this?' He saw that he was passing into nothingness."

From the above it will be seen that the Tolstoi of those days was a materialist pure and simple. "He saw that he was passing into nothingness," he said of his brother, as though there could be no question as to the nothingness of the individual consciousness that he had known as Nicolai, his brother.

This soul-harrowing materialism haunted Tolstoi during all the years of his youth and early manhood, and threw him constantly into fits of melancholy and inner brooding. He could neither dismiss the subject from his mind, nor could he bring into the area of his mortal consciousness that serene contemplation and optimistic line of reasoning which marks all that Emerson wrote.

Tolstoi's morbid horror of decay and death was not in any sense due to a lack of physical courage. It was the inevitable repulsion of a strong and robust animalism of the body, coupled with a powerful mentality—both of which are barriers to the "still small voice" of the soul, through which alone comes the conviction of the nothingness of death.

A biographer says of Tolstoi:

"The fit of the fear of death which at the end of the seventies brought him to the verge of suicide, was not the first and apparently not the last and at any rate not the only one. He felt something like it fifteen years before when his brother Nicolai died. Then he fell ill and conjectured the presence of the complaint that killed his brother—consumption. He had constant pain in his chest and side. He had to go and try to cure himself in the Steppe by a course of koumiss, and did actually cure himself. Formerly these recurrent attacks of spiritual or physical weakness were cured in him, not by any mental or moral upheavals, but simply by his vitality, its exuberance and intoxication."

The birth of the new consciousness which came to Tolstoi a few years later, was born into existence through these terrible struggles and mental agonies, inevitable because of the very nature of his heredity and education and environment. Although as we know, he came of gentle-folk, there was much of the Russian peasant in Tolstoi's makeup. His organism, both as to physical and mental elements, was like a piece of solid iron, untempered by the refining processes of an inherent spirituality. His never-ceasing struggle for attainment of the degree of cosmic consciousness which he finally reached was wholly an intellectual struggle. He possessed such a power of analysis, such a depth of intellectual perception, that he must needs go on or go mad with the strain of the question unanswered.

To such a mind, the admonition to "never mind about those questions; don't think about them," fell upon dull ears. He could no more cease thinking upon the mysteries of life and death than he could cease respiration. Nor could he blindly trust. He must know. Nothing is more unescapable than the soul's urge toward freedom—and freedom can be won only by liberation from the bondage of illusion.

Tolstoi's friends and biographers agree that along about his forty-fifth year, a great moral and religious change took place. The whole trend of his thoughts turned from the mortal consciousness to that inner self whence issues the higher qualities of mankind.

From a man who, although he was a great writer and a Russian nobleman, was yet a man like others of his kind, influenced by traditionary ideas of class and outward appearance; a man of conventional habits and ideas; Tolstoi emerged a free soul. He shook off the illusion of historical life and culture, and stood upon free, moral ground, estimating himself and his fellows by means of an insight which ignores the world's conventions and despises the world's standards of success. In short, Tolstoi had received Illumination and henceforth should he reckoned among those of the new birth.

In his own words, written in 1879, this change is described:

"Five years ago a change took place in me. I began to experience at first times of mental vacuity, of cessation of life, as if I did not know why I was to live or what I was to do. These suspensions of life always found expression in the same problem, 'Why am I here?' and then 'What next?' I had lived and lived and gone on and on till I had drawn near a precipice; I saw clearly that before me there lay nothing but destruction. With all my might I endeavored to escape from this life. And suddenly I, a happy man, began to hide my bootlaces that I might not hang myself between the wardrobes in my room when undressing at night; and ceased to take a gun with me out shooting, so as to avoid temptation by these two means of freeing myself from this life. * * *

"I lived in this way (that is to say, in communion with the people) for two years; and a change took place in me. What befell me was that the life of our class—the wealthy and cultured—not only became repulsive to me, but lost all significance. All our actions, our judgments, science, and art itself, appeared to me in a new light. I realized that it was all self-indulgence, and that it was useless to look for any meaning in it. I hated myself and acknowledged the truth. Now it had all become clear to me."

From this time on, Tolstoi's life was that of one who had entered into cosmic consciousness, as we note the effects in others. Desire for solitude a taste for the simple, natural things of life, possessed him. The primitive peasants and their coarse but wholesome food appealed to him. It was not a penance that Tolstoi imposed upon himself, that caused him to abandon the life of a country gentleman for that of a hut in the woods. The penance would come to such a one from enforced living in the glare of the world's artificialities. Cosmic consciousness bestows above all things a taste for simplicity; it restores the normal condition of mankind, the intimacy with nature and the feeling of kinship with nature-children.

It is not our purpose here to enter into any detailed biography of these instances of cosmic consciousness. The point we wish to make is the fact that the birth of this new consciousness frequently comes through much mental travail and agonies of doubt, speculation and questioning; but that it is worth the price paid, however seemingly great, there can be no possible distrust.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Balzac should head this chapter, if we were considering these philosophers in chronological order, as Balzac was born in 1799, preceding Emerson by a matter of four years. But Balzac's peculiar temperament, might almost be classed as a religious rather than strictly intellectual example of cosmic consciousness. Of the latter phase or expression of this "new" sense, as present-day writers frequently call it, Emerson is the most perfect example, because he was the most balanced; the most literary, in the strict interpretation of the word.

Balzac's place in literature is due far more to his wonderful spiritual insight, and his powerful imagination, than to his intellectuality, or to literary style. But that he was an almost complete case of cosmic consciousness is evident in all he wrote and in all he did. His life was absolutely consistent with the cosmic conscious man, living in a world where the race consciousness has not yet risen to the heights of the spiritually conscious life.

Bucke comments upon his decision against the state of matrimony, because, as Balzac himself declared, it would be an obstacle to the perfectibility of his interior senses, and to his flight through the spiritual worlds, and says: "When we consider the antagonistic attitude of so many of the great cases toward this relation (Gautama, Jesus, Paul, Whitman, etc.), there seems little doubt that anything like general possession of cosmic consciousness must abolish marriage as we know it to-day."

Balzac explains this seeming aversion to the marriage state as we know it to-day, in his two books, written during his early thirties, namely, Louis Lambert and Seraphita. "Louis Lambert" is regarded as in the nature of an autobiography, since Balzac, like his mouthpiece, Louis, viewed everything from an inner sense—from intuition, or the soul faculties, rather than from the standard of mere intellectual observation, analysis and synthesis. This inner sense, so real and so thoroughly understandable to those possessing it, is almost, if not quite, impossible of description to the complete comprehension of those who have no intimate relationship with this inner vision. To the person who views life from the inner sense, the soul sense (which is the approach to, and is included in, cosmic consciousness), the external or physical life is like a mirror reflecting, more or less inaccurately, the reality—the soul is the gazer, and the visible life is what he sees.

Balzac expresses this view in all he says and does. "All we are is in the soul," he says, and the perfection or the imperfection of what we externalize, depends upon the development of the soul.

It is this marvelously developed inner vision that makes marriage, on the sense-conscious plane, which is the plane upon which we know marriage as it is to-day, objectionable to Balzac.

His spirit had already united with its spiritual counterpart, and his soul sought the embodiment of that union in the flesh. This he did not find in the perfection and completeness which from his inner view he knew to exist.

Barriers of caste, or class; of time and space; of age; of race and color; of condition; may intervene between counterparts on the physical plane; nay, one may be manifesting in the physical body and the other have abandoned the body, but as there is neither time nor space nor condition to the spirit, this union may have been sought and found, and reflected to the mortal consciousness, in which case marriage with anything less than the one true counterpart would be unsatisfactory, if not altogether objectionable.

With this view in mind, Seraphita becomes as lucid a bit of reading as anything to be found in literature.

Seraphita is the perfected being—the god into which man is developing, or more properly speaking, unfolding, since man must unfold into that from which he started, but with consciousness added.

Everywhere, in ancient and modern mysticism, we find the assumption that God is dual—male and female. The old Hebrew word for God is plural—Elohim.

Humankind invariably and persistently, even though half-mockingly, alludes to man and wife as "one"; and men and women speak of each other, when married, as "my other half."

That which persists has a basis in fact, and symbolizes the perfect type. What we know of marriage as it is to-day, proves to us beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the man-made institution of marriage does not make man and woman one, nor insure that two halves of the same whole are united. The highest type of men and women to-day are at best but half-gods, but these are prophecies of the future race, "the man-god whom we await" as Emerson puts it. But that which we await is the man-woman-god, the Perfected Being, of whom Balzac writes in Seraphita.

It has been said that Madame Hanska, whom the author finally married only six months previous to his death, was the original of Seraphita, but it would seem that this great affection, tender and enduring as it was, partook far more of a beautiful friendship between two souls who knew and understood each other's needs, than it did of that blissful and ecstatic union of counterparts, which everywhere is described by those who have experienced it, as a sensation of melting or merging into the other's being.

Seraphita is the embodiment, in human form, of the idea expressed in the world-old belief in a perfected being; whose perfection was complete when the two halves of the one should have found each other.

The inference is very generally made that Balzac believed in and sought to express the idea of a bi-sexual individual—a personality who is complete in himself or herself as a person; one in which the intuitive, feminine principle and the reasoning, masculine principle had become perfectly balanced—in short, an androgynous human.

This idea is apparently further substantiated by the fact that Seraphita was loved by Minna, a beautiful young girl to whom Seraphita was always Seraphitus, an ideal lover; and by Wilfrid, to whom Seraphita represented his ideal of feminine loveliness, both in mind and body; a young girl possessing marvelous, almost miraculous, wisdom, but yet a woman with human passions and human virtues—his ideal of wifehood and motherhood.

But whatever the idea that Balzac intended to convey, whether, as is generally believed, Seraphita was an androgynous being, or whether she symbolized the perfection of soul-union, our contention is that this union is not a creation of the imagination, but the accomplishment of the plan of creation—the final goal of earthly pilgrimage; the raison d'etre of love itself.

One argument against the idea that Seraphita was intended to illustrate an androgynous being, rather than a perfected human, who had her spiritual mate, is found in the words in which she refused to marry Wilfrid, although Balzac makes it plainly evident that she was attracted to Wilfrid with a degree of sense-attraction, due to the fact that she was still living within the environment of the physical, and therefore subject to the illusions of the mortal, even while her spiritual consciousness was so fully developed as to enable her to perceive and realize the difference between an attraction that was based largely upon sense, and that which was of the soul.

Wilfrid says to her:

"Have you no soul that you are not seduced by the prospect of consoling a great man, who will sacrifice all to live with you in a little house by the border of a lake?"

"But," answers Seraphita, "I am loved with a love without bounds."

And when Wilfrid with insane anger and jealousy asked who it was whom Seraphita loved and who loved her, she answered "God."

At another time, when Minna, to whom she had often spoken in veiled terms of a mysterious being who loved her and whom she loved, asked her who this person was, she answered:

"I can love nothing here on earth."

"What dost thou love then?" asked Minna.

"Heaven" was the reply.

This obscurity and uncertainty as to what manner of love it was that absorbed Seraphita, and who was the object of it, could not have been possible had it been the usual devotion of the religeuse.

Seraphita, whose consciousness extended far beyond that of the people about her, could not have explained to her friends that the invisible realms were as real to her as the visible universe was to those with only sense-consciousness. It was impossible to explain to them that she had found and knew her mate, even though she had not met him in the physical body.

To Wilfrid she said she loved "God." To Minna she used the term "Heaven," and when Minna questioned: "But art thou worthy of heaven when thou despisest the creatures of God?" Seraphita answered:

"Couldst thou love two beings at once? Would a lover be a lover if he did not fill the heart? Should he not be the first, the last, the only one? She who loves will she not quit the world for her lover? Her entire family becomes a memory; she has no longer a relative. The lover! she has given him her whole soul. If she has kept a fraction of it, she does not love. To love feebly, is that to love? The word of the lover makes all her joy, and quivers in her veins like a purple deeper than blood; his glance is a light which penetrates her; she dissolves in him; there, where he is, all is beautiful; he is warmth to the soul: he irradiates everything; near him could one know cold or night? He is never absent; he is ever within us; we think in him, to him, for him. Minna, that is the-way I love."

And when Minna, like Wilfrid, "seized by a devouring jealousy," demanded to know "whom?" Seraphita answered, "God." This she did because the one whom she loved became her God. We are told that "love makes gods of men." Perfect love, the love of those who are spiritual-mates—soul-mates—the "man-woman-god whom we await," becomes an immortal: and immortals are gods.

Moreover if Seraphita had intended to teach the love of the religious devotee to The Absolute instead of a perfected sex-love, she would not have pointed out to both Wilfrid and Minna that which she, in her superior vision, her supra-consciousness, perceived, namely, that Wilfrid and Minna were really intended for spiritual mates, and that what they each saw in her was really a prophecy of their own perfected and spiritualized love.

The subject is one that is positively incomprehensible and unexplainable to the average mind. All mystic literature, when read with the eyes of understanding, exalts and spiritualizes sex. The latter day degeneration of sex is the "trail of the serpent," which Woman is to crush with her heel. And Woman is crushing it to-day, although to the superficial observer, who sees only surface conditions, it would appear as though Woman had fallen from her high estate, to take her place on a footing with man. This view is the exoteric, and not the esoteric, one.

They who have ears hear the inner voice, and they who have eyes see with the inner sight. The mystery of sex is the eternal mystery which each must solve for himself before he can comprehend it, and when solved eliminates all sense of sin and shame; brings Illumination in which everything is made clear and makes man-woman immortal—a god.

Swedenborg's theory of Heaven as a never-ending honeymoon in which spiritually-mated humans dwell, has been denounced by many as "shocking" to a refined and sensitive mind. But this idea is shocking only because even the most advanced minds are seldom Illumined, their advancement being along the lines of intellectual research and acquired knowledge, which, as we have previously explained, is not synonymous with interior wisdom.

The illumined mind is bound to find in the eternal and ever-present fact of sex, the key to the mysteries—the password to immortal godhood.

The subject is one that cannot be set forth in printed words; this fact is, indeed, the very Plan of Illumination. It cannot be taught. It must be found. Only those who have glimpsed its truth can even imperfectly point the way in which it may be discovered. No teacher can guarantee it. It is the most evanescent, the most delicate, the most indescribable thing in the Cosmos. It is therefore the most readily misinterpreted and misunderstood.

Balzac doubtless understood, not as a matter of perception of a truth but as an experience, and this fact, if no other, marks him as one having a very high degree of cosmic consciousness.

Seraphita called herself a "Specialist." When Minna inquired how it was that Seraphitus could read the souls of men, the answer was:

"I have the gift of Specialism. Specialism is an inward sight that can penetrate all things; you will understand its full meaning only through comparison. In the great cities of Europe works are produced by which the human hand seeks to represent the effects of the moral nature as well as those of the physical nature, as well as those of the ideas in marble. The sculptor acts on the stone; he fashions it; he puts a realm of ideas into it. There are statues which the hand of man has endowed with the faculty of representing the whole noble side of humanity, or the evil side of it; most men see in such marbles a human figure and nothing more; a few older men, a little higher in the scale of being, perceive a fraction of the thoughts expressed in the statue; but the Initiates in the secrets of art are of the same intellect as the sculptor; they see in his work the whole universe of thought. Such persons are in themselves the principles of art; they bear within them a mirror which reflects nature in her slightest manifestations. Well, so it is with me; I have within me a mirror before which the moral nature, with its causes and its effects, appears and is reflected. Entering thus into the consciousness of others I am able to divine both the future and the past * * * though what I have said does not define the gift of Specialism, for to conceive the nature of that gift we must possess it."

This describes in terms similar to those employed by others who possess cosmic consciousness, the results of this inner light, which Seraphita calls a "mirror."

And yet, with this seemingly exhaustive and lucid exposition of the effects of Illumination, Seraphita declares that "to conceive the nature of this gift we must possess it."

Balzac further comments upon what he terms this gift of Specialism, which is cosmic consciousness or illumination, thus:

"The specialist is necessarily the loftiest expression of man—the link which connects the visible to the superior worlds. He acts, he sees, he feels through his inner being. The abstractive thinks. The instinctive simply acts. Hence three degrees for man. As an instinctive he is below the level; as an abstractive he attains it; as a specialist he rises above it. Specialism opens to man his true career; the Infinite dawns upon him—he catches a glimpse of his destiny."

The merely sense-conscious man is the man-animal; the abstractive man is the average man and woman in the world to-day—the human who is evolving out of the mental into the spiritual consciousness. The specialist is the cosmic conscious one, the one who "catches a glimpse of his destiny."

Balzac, in company with all who attain cosmic consciousness, had a great capacity for suffering; and this soul-loneliness became crystalized into spiritual wisdom, which he expressed in the words and in the manner most likely to be accepted by the world.

How else can that divine union to which we are heirs and for which we are either blindly, consciously, or supra-consciously, striving, be described and exploited without danger of defilement and degeneracy, save and except by the phrase "unity with God"?

All mystics have found it necessary to veil the "secret of secrets," lest the unworthy (because unready) defile it with his gaze, even as the sinful devotee prostrates himself hiding his face, while the priest raises the chalice containing the holy eucharist in the ceremony of the mass.



CHAPTER XIV

ILLUMINATION AS EXPRESSED IN THE POETICAL TEMPERAMENT

Poetry is the natural language of cosmic consciousness. "The music of the spheres" is a literal expression, as all who have ever glimpsed the beauties of the spiritual realms will testify.

"Poets are the trumpets which sing to battle. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," said Shelley.

Not that all poets are aware, in their mortal consciousness, of their divine mission, or of their spiritual glimpses.

The outer mind, the mortal or carnal mind—that part of our organism whose office it is to take care of the physical body, for its preservation and its well-being, may be so dominant as, to hold in bondage the atman, but it can not utterly silence its voice.

Thus the true poet is also a seer; a prophet; a spiritually-conscious being, for such time, or during such phases of inspiration, as he becomes imbued with the spirit of poetry.

A person who writes rhymes is not necessarily a poet. So, too, there are poets who do not express their inspirations according to the rules of metre and syntax.

Between that which Balzac tabulated as the "abstractive" type of human evolvement and that which is fully cosmic in consciousness, there are many and diverse degrees of the higher faculties; but the poet always expresses some one of these degrees of the higher consciousness; indeed some poets are of that versatile nature that they run the entire gamut of the emotional nature, now descending to the ordinary normal consciousness which takes account only of the personal self; again ascending to the heights of the impersonal fearlessness and unassailable confidence that is the heritage of those who have reached the full stature of the "man-god whom we await"—the cosmic conscious race that is to be.

All commentators upon modern instances of Illumination unite in regarding Walt Whitman as one of the most, if not the most, perfect example of whom we have any record of cosmic consciousness and its sublime effects upon the character and personality of the illumined one.

Whitman is a sublime type for reasons which are of first importance in their relation to character as viewed from the ideals of the cosmic conscious race-to-be.

Moralists have criticized Whitman as immoral; religionists have deplored his lack of a religious creed; literary critics have denied his claim to high rank in the world of literature; but Walt Whitman is unquestionably without a peer in the roundness of his genius; in the simplicity of his soul; in the catholicity of his sympathy; in the perfect poise and self-control and imperturbability of his kindness. His biographers agree as to his never-failing good nature. He was without any of those fits of unrest and temperamental eccentricities which are supposed to be the "sign manual" of the child of the poetic muse.

In Whitman it would seem that all those petty prejudices against any nationality or class of men, were entirely absent. He exalted the common-place, not as a pose, nor because he had given himself to that task, but because to him there was no common-place. In the cosmic perception of the universe, everything is exalted to the plane of fitness. As to the pure all things are pure, so to the one who is steeped in the sublimity of Divine Illumination, there is no high or low, no good or bad, no white or black, or rich or poor; all—all is a part of the plan, and, in its place in cosmic evolution, it fits.

Whitman cries:

"All! all! Let others ignore what they may, I make the poem of evil also, I commemorate that part also; I am myself just as much evil as good, and my nation is, and I say there, is in fact no evil."

Compared to the religious aspect of cosmic consciousness in which, previous to the time of Illumination, the devotee had striven to rise to spiritual heights through disdaining the flesh, this note of Whitman's is a new note—the nothingness of evil as such; the righteousness of the flesh and the holiness of earthly, or human, love, bespeaks the prophet of the New Dispensation; the time hinted of by Jesus, the Master, when he said, "when the twain shall be one and the outside as the inside," as a sign and symbol of the blessed time to come when the kingdom he spoke of (not his personal kingdom, but the kingdom which he represented, the kingdom of Love), should come upon earth.

Whitman's illumination is essentially poetic; not that it is not also intellectual and moral; but after his experience—at least an experience more notable than any hitherto recorded by him, in or about his thirty-fifth year—we find his conversation invariably reflecting the beauty and poetical imagery of his mind. He may be said to have lived and moved and had his being in a state of blissful unconsciousness of anything unclean or impure, or unnatural.

This absence of consciousness of evil is in no wise synonymous with a type of person who exalts his undeveloped animal tendencies under the guise of liberation from a sense of sin. Neither is this discrimination easy of attainment to any but those who realize in their own hearts the very distinct difference between the nothingness of sin and the pretended acceptance of perversions as purity.

While we are on this point we must again emphasize the truth that cosmic consciousness cannot be gained by prescription; there is no royal road to mukti. Liberation from the lower manas can not be bought or sold, it can not be explained or comprehended, save by those to whom the attainment of such a state is at least possible if not probable.

Illustrative of his sense of unity with all life (one of the most salient characteristics of the fully cosmic conscious man), are these lines of Whitman's:

"Voyaging to every port, to dicker and adventure; Hurrying with the modern crowd, as eager and fickle as any; Hot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him; Solitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me a long while; Walking the hills of Judea, with the beautiful gentle God by my side; Speeding through space—speeding through Heaven and the stars."

Oriental mysticism tells us that one of the attributes of the liberated one is the power to read the hearts and souls of all men; to feel what they feel; and to so unite with them in consciousness that we are for the time being the very person or thing we contemplate. If this be indeed the test of godhood, Whitman expresses it in every line:

"The disdain and calmness of olden martyrs; The mother condemned for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on; The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, covered with sweat; The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck—the murderous buckshot and the bullets; All these I feel, or am."

Seeking to express the sense of knowing and especially of feeling, and the bigness and broadness of life, the scorn of petty aims and strife; in short, that interior perception which Illumination brings, he says:

"Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? have you reckoned the earth much? Have you practised so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems; You shall possess the good of the earth and sun—there are millions of suns left; You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books; You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me; You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from yourself. I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end; But I do not talk of the beginning nor the end.

* * * * *

"There was never any more inception than there is now; Nor any more youth or age than there is now; And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now."

A perception of eternity as an ever-present reality is one of the characteristic signs of the inception of the new birth.

Birth and death become nothing more nor yet less, than events in the procedure of eternal life; age becomes merely a graduation garment; God and heaven are not separated from us by any reality; they become every-day facts.

Whitman tells of the annihilation of any sense of separateness from his soul side, in the following words:

"Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul."

He did not confound his mortal consciousness, the lower manas, with the higher—the soul; neither did he recognize an impassable gulf between them.

While admittedly ascending to the higher consciousness from the lower, Whitman refused to follow the example of the saints and sages of old, and mortify or despise the lower self—the manifestation. He had indeed struck the balance; he recognized his dual nature, each in its rightful place and with its rightful possessions, and refused to abase either "I am" to the other. He literally "rendered unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's," by claiming for the flesh the purity and the cleanliness of God's handiwork.

In Whitman, too, we find an almost perfect realization of immortality and of blissfulness of life and the complete harmony and unity of his soul with all there is. Following closely upon the experience that seems to have been the most vivid of the many instances of illumination which he enjoyed throughout a long life, he wrote the following lines, indicative of the emotions immediately associated with the influx of illumination:

"Swiftly arose and spread around me, the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of earth; And I know that the hand of God is the elder hand of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of creation is love."

In lines written in 1860, about seven years after the first vivid instance of the experience of illumination which afterward became oft-recurrent, Whitman speaks of what he calls "Perfections," and from what he writes we may assume that he referred to those possessing cosmic consciousness, and the practical impossibility of describing this peculiarity and accounting for the alteration it makes in character and outlook.

Says Whitman:

"Only themselves understand themselves, and the like of themselves, As souls only understand souls."

It has been pointed out that Whitman more perfectly illustrates the type of the coming man—the cosmic conscious race, because Whitman's illumination seems to have come without the terrible agonies of doubt and prayer and mortification of the flesh, which characterize so many of those saints and sages of whom we read in sacred literature. But it must not be inferred from this that Whitman's life was devoid of suffering.

A biographer says of him:

"He has loved the earth, sun, animals; despised riches, given alms to every one that asked; stood up for the stupid and crazy; devoted his income and labor to others; according to the command of the divine voice; and was impelled by the divine impulse; and now for reward he is poor, despised, sick, paralyzed, neglected, dying. His message to men, to the delivery of which he devoted his life, which has been dearer in his eyes (for man's sake) than wife, children, life itself, is unread, or scoffed and jeered at. What shall he say to God? He says that God knows him through and through, and that he is willing to leave himself in God's hands."

But above and beyond all this, is the sense of oneness with all who suffer which is ever a heritage of the cosmic conscious one, even while he is, at the same time, the recipient of states of bliss and certainty of immortality, and melting soul-love, incomprehensible and indescribable to the non-initiate. Whitman's calm and poise was not that of the ice-encrusted egotist. It is the poise of the perfectly balanced man-god equally aware of his human and his divine attributes; and justly estimating both; nor drawing too fine a line between.

"I embody all presence outlawed or suffering; See myself in prison, shaped like another man, And feel the dull unintermitted pain.

* * * * *

"For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch; It is I left out in the morning, and barr'd at night. Not a mutineer walks handcuffed to jail, but I am handcuffed and walk by his side;

* * * * *

"Not a youngster is taken for larceny, but I go up too, and am tried and sentenced. Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp; My face is ash-colored—my sinews gnarl—away from me people retreat.

* * * * *

"Askers embody themselves in me, and I am embodied in them; I project my hat, sit shame-faced and beg."

If any one imagines that Whitman was not a religious man, let him read the following:

"I say that no man has ever yet been half devout enough; None has ever yet adored or worshipped half enough; None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain the future is."

There is a sublime confidence and worship in these words which belittles the churchman's hope and prayer that God may be good to him and bless him with a future life. Whitman's philosophy, less specific as to method, is assuredly more certain, more faithful in effect. Whitman had the experience of being immersed in a sea of light and love, so frequently a phenomenon of Illumination; he retained throughout all his life a complete and perfect assurance of immortality.

His sense of union with and relationship to all living things was as much a part of him as the color of his eyes and hair; he did not have to remind himself of it, as a religious duty.

He experienced a keen joy in nature and in the innocent, childlike pleasures of everyday things, and at the same time possessed a splendid intellect.

All consciousness of sin or evil had been erased from his mind and actually had no place in his life.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

In the case of Lord Tennyson, we have a definite recognition of two distinct states of consciousness, finally culminating in a clear experience of cosmic consciousness; this experience was so positive as to leave no doubt or indecision in his mind regarding the reality of the spiritual, and the illusory character of the external life.

In truth Tennyson had so fixed his consciousness in the spiritual rather than in the external, that he looked out from that inner self, as through the windows of a house; he was prepared, as he said, to believe that his body was but an imaginary symbol of himself, but nothing and no one could persuade him that the real Tennyson, the I am consciousness of being which was he, was other than spiritual, eternal, undying.

Like so many others, notably Whitman, who have realized a more or less full degree of cosmic consciousness, Tennyson was deeply and reverently religious, although not partisanly connected with church work. Tennyson's early boyhood was marked by experiences which usually befall persons of the psychic temperament. As he himself described these states of consciousness, they were moments in which the ego transcended the limits of self consciousness and entered the limitless realm of spirit.

They do not tabulate with the ordinary trance condition of the spiritualistic medium, who subjects his own self consciousness to a "control," although Tennyson always believed that the best of his writings were inspired by, and written under "the direct influence of higher intelligences, of whose presence he was distinctly conscious. He felt them near him and his mind was impressed by their ideas."

The point which we emphasize is that these peculiar states of consciousness are not synonymous with the western idea of trance as seen in mediumship, although Tennyson uses the term "trance" in describing them.

He says:

"A kind of walking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has often come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently until all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade into boundless being."

It is a fact that children of a peculiarly sensitive or psychic temperament seem to have strange ideas regarding the name by which they are called, and not infrequently become confused and filled with an inexplicable wonderment at the sound 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 to define in terms comprehensible to sense-consciousness only, emotions and experiences which involve loss of self, and at the same time gain of the Self?

Tennyson's frequent excursions into the realm of spiritual consciousness while still a child, bears out our contention that many children not infrequently have this experience, and either through reserve or from lack of ability to explain it, keep the matter to themselves; generally losing or "outgrowing" the tendency as they enter the activities of school life, and the mortal mind becomes dominant in them. This is especially true of the rising generation, and we personally know several clearly defined instances which have been reported to us, during conversations upon the theme of cosmic consciousness.

YONE NOGUCHI

Any one who has ever had the good fortune to read a little book of verse entitled "From the Eastern Seas," by Yone Noguchi, a young Japanese, will at once pronounce them a beautiful and perhaps perfect example of verse that may be correctly labeled "cosmic."

Noguchi was under nineteen years of age when he penned these verses, but they are thoughts and expressions possible only to one who lives the greater part of his life within the illumination of the cosmic sense. They are so delicate as to have little, if any, of the mortal in them.

It is also significant that Noguchi in these later years (he is now only a little past thirty), does not reproduce this cosmic atmosphere in his writings to such an extent, due no doubt to the fact that his daily occupation (that of Professor of Languages in the Imperial College of Tokio), compels his outer attention, excluding the fullness of the inner vision.

The following lines, are perfect as an exposition of spiritual consciousness in which the lesser self has become submerged:

"Underneath the shade of the trees, myself passed into somewhere as a cloud. I see my soul floating upon the face of the deep, nay the faceless face of the deepless deep— Ah, the seas of loneliness. The silence-waving waters, ever shoreless, bottomless, colorless, have no shadow of my passing soul. I, without wisdom, without foolishness, without goodness, without badness—am like God, a negative god at least."

The almost perpetual state of spiritual consciousness in which the young poet lived at this time is apparent in the following lines:

"When I am lost in the deep body of the mist on a hill, The universe seems built with me as its pillar. Am I the god upon the face of the deep, nay— The deepless deepness in the beginning?"

And the following, possible of comprehension only to one who has glimpsed the eternal verity of man's spiritual reality, and the shadow-like quality of the external; could have been written only by one freed from the bonds of illusion:

"The mystic silence of the moon, Gradually revived in me immortality; The sorrow that gently stirred Was melancholy-sweet; sorrow is higher Far than joy, the sweetest sorrow is supreme Amid all the passions. I had No sorrow of mortal heart: my sorrow Was one given before the human sorrows Were given me. Mortal speech died From me: my speech was one spoken before God bestowed on me human speech. There is nothing like the moon-night When I, parted from the voice of the city, Drink deep of Infinity with peace From another, a stranger sphere. There is nothing Like the moon-night when the rich, noble stars And maiden roses interchange their long looks of love. When I raise my face from the land of loss Unto the golden air, and calmly learn How perfect it is to grow still as a star. There is nothing like the moon-night When I walk upon the freshest dews, And amid the warmest breezes, With all the thought of God And all the bliss of man, as Adam Not yet driven from Eden, and to whom Eve was not yet born. What a bird Dreams in the moonlight is my dream: What a rose sings is my song."

The true poet does not need individual experiences of either sorrow or of joy. His spirit is so attuned to the song of the universe; so sympathetic with the moans of earthly trials, that every vibration from the heart of the universe reaches him; stabs him with its sorrow, or irradiates his being with joy.

Jesus is fitly portrayed to us as "The Man of Sorrows"; even while we recognize him as a self-conscious son of God—an immortal being fully aware of his escape from enchantment, and his heirship to Paradise.

Cosmic consciousness bestows a bliss that is past all words to describe and it also quickens the sympathies and attunes the soul to the vibrations of the heart-cries of the struggling evolving ones who are still travailing in the pains of the new birth. We must be willing to endure the suffering in order that we may realize the joy; not because joy is the reward for suffering, but because it is only by losing sight of the personal self that we become aware of that inner Self which is immortal and blissful; and when we become aware of the reality of that inner Self, we know that we are united with the all, and must feel with all.

It would be impossible in one volume to enumerate all the poets who have given evidence of supra-consciousness. As has been previously pointed out, all true poets are at least temporarily aware of their dual nature—rather, one should say, the dual phases of their consciousness. Many, perhaps, do not function beyond the higher planes of the psychic vibrations, but even these are aware of the reality of the soul, and the illusion of the sense-conscious, mortal life.

Dante; the Brownings; Shelley; Swinbourne; Goethe; Milton; Keats; Rosetti; Shakespeare; Pope; Lowell—where should we stop, did we essay to draw a line?

WORDSWORTH

Wordsworth, the poet of Nature has given us in his own words, so clearly cut an outline of his Illumination, that we can not resist recording here the salient points which mark his experience as that of cosmic consciousness, transcending the more frequent phenomenon of soul-consciousness and its psychic functions.

Wordsworth's Ode to immortality epitomizes the lesson of the Yoga sutras—out of The Absolute we come, and return to immortal bliss with consciousness added. Wordsworth also affords an excellent example of our contention that cosmic consciousness does not come to us at any specific age or time. Wordsworth distinctly says that as a child he possessed this faculty, as for example his oft-repeated words, both in conversation and in his biography:

"Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death, as a state applicable to my own being. It was not so much from feelings of animal vivacity that my difficulty came, as from a sense of the indomitableness of the spirit within me. I used to brood over the stories of Enoch and Elijah, and almost to persuade myself that, whatever might become of others, I should be translated, in something of the same way, to heaven. With a feeling congenial to this, I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree, to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality."

In later life, Wordsworth lost the realization of this supra-consciousness, in what a commentator calls a "fever of rationalism"; but the power of that wonderful spiritual vision, pronounced in his youth, could not be utterly lost and soon after he reached his thirtieth year, he again becomes the spiritual poet, fully conscious of his higher nature—the cosmic conscious self.

WILLIAM SHARP—"FIONA MACLEOD"

A pronounced instance of the two phases of consciousness, is that of the late William Sharp, one of the best known writers of the modern English school.

It was not until after the death of William Sharp, that the secret of this dual personality was given to the public, although a few of his most intimates had known it for several years. In the "Memoirs" compiled by Elizabeth Sharp, wife of the writer, we find the following:

"The life of William Sharp divides itself naturally into two halves: the first ends with the publication by William Sharp of 'Vistas,' and the second begins with 'Pharais,' the first book signed Fiona Macleod."

In these memoirs, the point is made obvious that Fiona Macleod is not merely a nom de plume; neither is she an obsessing personality; a guide or "control," as the Spiritualists know that phenomenon. Fiona Macleod, always referred to by William Sharp as "she," is his own higher Self—the cosmic consciousness of the spiritual man which was so nearly balanced in the personality of William Sharp as to appear to the casual observer as another person.

It is said that the identity of Fiona Macleod, as expressed in the manuscript put out under that name, was seldom suspected to be that of William Sharp, so different was the style and the tone of the work of these two phases of the same personality.

In this connection it may be well to quote his wife's opinion regarding the two phases of personality, answering the belief of Yeats the Irish poet that he believed William Sharp to be the most extraordinary psychic he ever encountered and saying that Fiona Macleod was evidently a distinct personality. In the Memoirs, Mrs. Sharp comments upon this and says:

"It is true, as I have said, that William Sharp seemed a different person when the Fiona mood was on him; but that he had no recollection of what he said in that mood was not the case—the psychic visionary power belonged exclusively to neither; it influenced both and was dictated by laws he did not understand."

Mrs. Sharp refers to William Sharp and Fiona, as two persons, saying that "it influenced both," but both sides of his personality rather than both personalities, is what she claims. In further explanation she writes:

"I remember from early days how he would speak of the momentary curious 'dazzle in the brain,' which preceded the falling away of all material things and precluded some inner vision of great beauty, or great presences, or some symbolic import—that would pass as rapidly as it came. I have been beside him when he has been in trance and I have felt the room throb with heightened vibration."

One of the "dream-visions" which William Sharp experienced shortly before his last illness, is headed "Elemental Symbolism," and was recorded by him in these beautiful words:

"I saw Self, or Life, symbolized all about me as a limitless, fathomless and lonely sea. I took a handful and threw it into the grey silence of ocean air, and it returned at once as a swift and potent flame, a red fire crested with brown sunrise, rushing from between the lips of sky and sea to the sound as of innumerable trumpets."

"In another dream he visited a land where there was no more war, where all men and women were equal; where humans, birds and beasts were no longer at enmity, or preyed on one another. And he was told that the young men of the land had to serve two years as missionaries to those who lived at the uttermost boundaries. 'To what end?' he asked. 'To cast out fear, our last enemy.' In the house of his host he was struck by the beauty of a framed painting that seemed to vibrate with rich colors. 'Who painted that?' he asked. His host smiled, 'We have long since ceased to use brushes and paints. That is a thought projected from the artist's brain, and its duration will be proportionate with its truth.'"

In explanation of why he chose to put out so much of the creative work of his brain under the signature of a woman, and how he happened to use the name Fiona Macleod, Sharp explained that when he began to realize how strong was the feminine element in the book Pharais, he decided to issue the book under a woman's name and Fiona Macleod "flashed ready-made" into his mind. "My truest self, the self who is below all other selves must find expression," he explained. The Self that is above the other self is what he should have said. The following extracts are from the Fiona Macleod phase of William Sharp and are characteristic of the Self, as evidenced in all instances of Illumination, particularly as these expressions refer to the nothingness of death, and the beauty and power of Love. "Do not speak of the spiritual life as 'another life'; there is no 'other life'; what we mean by that, is with us now. The great misconception of death is that it is the only door to another world." This testimony corroborates that of Whitman as well as of St. Paul, notwithstanding all the centuries that separate the two. St. Paul did not say that man will have a spiritual body, but that he has a spiritual body as well as a corporeal body.

After the experience of his illumination, William Sharp, writing as Fiona Macleod constantly testified to the ever-present reality of his spiritual life; a life far more real to him than the sense-conscious life although he alluded to it as his dream. In one place he says:

"Now truly, is dreamland no longer a phantasy of sleep, but a loveliness so great that, like deep music, there could be no words wherewith to measure it, but only the breathless unspoken speech of the soul upon whom has fallen the secret dews."

Of the impossibility of adequately explaining the mystery of Illumination and the sensations it inspires, he says, speaking through the Self of Fiona Macleod: "I write, not because I know a mystery, and would reveal it, but because I have known a mystery and am to-day as a child before it, and can neither reveal nor interpret it."

This is comparable with Whitman's "when I try to describe the best, I can not. My tongue is ineffectual on its pivots."

Another sentence from Fiona:

"There is a great serenity in the thought of death, when it is known to be the gate of Life."

Like all who have gained the Great Blessing, the revelation to the mind of that higher Self, that we are, William Sharp suffered keenly. The despair of the world was his, co-equal with the Joy of the Spirit. Indeed, his is at once the gift and the burden of the Illuminati.

Mrs. Mona Caird said of him: "He was almost encumbered by the infinity of his perceptions; by the thronging interests, intuitions, glimpses of wonders, beauties, and mysteries which made life for him a pageant and a splendor such as is only disclosed to the soul that has to bear the torment and revelations of genius."

The burden of the world's sorrow; the longings and aspirations of the soul that has glimpsed, or that has more fully cognized the realms of the Spirit which are its rightful home; are ever a part of the price of liberation. The illumined mind sees and hears and feels the vibrations that emanate from all who are travailing in the meshes of the sense-conscious life; but through all the sympathetic sorrow, there runs the thread of a divine assurance and certainty of profound joy—a bliss that passes comprehension or description.

Mrs. Sharp, in the final conclusion of the Memoirs says "to quote my husband's own words—ever below all the stress and failure, below all the triumph of his toil, lay the beauty of his dream."

In accordance with an oft-repeated request, these lines are inscribed on the Iona cross carved in lava, which marks the grave wherein is laid to rest the earthly form of William Sharp:

"Farewell to the known and exhausted, Welcome the unknown and illimitable."

And this:

"Love is more great than we conceive, and death is the keeper of unknown redemptions."

They are from his higher Self; from the illumined "Dominion of Dreams."



CHAPTER XV

METHODS OF ATTAINMENT: THE WAY OF ILLUMINATION

Oriental philosophies recognize four important methods of yoga.

Yoga is the word which signifies "uniting with God." From what has gone before in these pages, the reader will understand that unity with God means to us, the uncovering of the god-nature within or above, the human personality; it means the attainment and retainment in fullness of cosmic consciousness. We do not believe that any one retains full and complete realization of cosmic consciousness and remains in the physical body. The numerous instances to which we allude in former chapters, are at best, but temporary flights into that state, which is the goal of the soul's pilgrimage, and the only means of escape from the "ceaseless round of births and deaths" which so weighed upon the heart of Gautama.

The paths of yoga then, are the methods by which the mind, in the personal self, is made to perceive the reality of the higher Self, and its relation to the Supreme Intelligence—The Absolute.

The various methods or paths are pointed out, but no one, nor all of these paths guarantees illumination as a reward for diligence. That which is in the heart of the disciple is the key that unlocks the door.

These paths are called:

Karma Yoga; Raja Yoga; Gnani Yoga; Bhakti Yoga.

Karma Yoga is the path of cheerful submission to the conditions in which the disciple finds himself, believing that those conditions are his because of his needs, and in order that he may fulfill that which he has attracted to himself. The admonition "whatever thy hand finds to do that doest thou with all thy heart," sums up the lessons of the path of Karma Yoga. The urge to achieve: to do; to accomplish; to strive and attain, actuates those who have, whether with conscious intent, or because of a vague "inward urge," devoted their lives to taking an active part in the material or intellectual achievements of the race.

There are those who are blindly following (as far as their mental operations are concerned), the path of Karma Yoga; that is, they work without knowing why they work; they work because they are compelled to do so, as slaves of the law; these will work their way out of that necessity of fulfillment, in the course of time, even though they blindly follow the urge; but, if they could be made to work as masters of the conditions under which they labor, instead of as slaves to environment, they would find themselves at the end of that path. Karma Yoga would have been accomplished.

"Work as those work who are ambitious" but be not thou enslaved by the delusion of personal ambition—this is the password to liberation from Karma Yoga.

Raja Yoga is the way of the strongly individualized will. "Knowledge is power" is the hope which encourages the disciple on the path of Raja Yoga. He seeks to master the personal self by meditation, by concentration of will; by self discipline and sacrifice. When the ego gains complete control over the mental faculties, so that the mind may be directed as the individual will suggests, the student has mastered the path of Raja Yoga. If his mastery is complete, he finds himself regarding his body as the instrument of the Self, and the body and its functions are under the guidance of the ego; the mind is the lever with which this Self raises the consciousness from the lower to the higher vibrations. The student who has mastered Raja Yoga can induce the trance state; control his dreams as well as his waking thoughts; he may learn to practice magic in its higher aspects, but unless he is extremely careful this power will tempt him to use his knowledge for selfish or unworthy purposes.

Let the student of Raja Yoga bear in mind the one great and high purpose of his efforts, which should be: the realization of his spiritual nature, and the development of his individual self, so that it finally merges into the spiritual Self, thus gaining immortality "in the flesh."

Does this "flesh" mean the physical body? Not necessarily, because this that we see and name "the physical body" is not the real body, any more than the clothing that covers it, is the person, although frequently we recognize acquaintances by their clothing. Immortality in the flesh means cessation from further incarnations, the last and present personality including all others in consciousness, until we can say, "I, manifesting in the physical, as so-and-so, am now and forever immortal, remembering other manifestations which were not sufficiently complete, but which added to the sum of my consciousness until now I know myself a deathless being."

To those who seek the path of Raja Yoga, we recommend meditation upon Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, of which there are several translations, differing slightly as to interpretation. We have selected some of the most important, from the translations by Johnston. They are designed to make clear the difference between the self of personality, and the Self, or atman which manifests in personality:

"The personal self seeks to feast upon life, through a failure to perceive the distinction between the personal self and the spiritual man. All personal experience really exists for the sake of another: namely, the spiritual man. By perfectly concentrated meditation on experience for the sake of the Self, comes a knowledge of the spiritual man."

The wise person seeks experience in order that he may attain to the standard of the spiritual man; doing all things for the lessons that they teach; working "as those work who are ambitious," and yet having no personal ambition. Looking on all life, and at the self of personality and knowing the illusion of the self he is raising the personal self to the spiritual plane; but always he has the handicap of the desires of the lower self, the personal, which "seeks to feast on life," because it is born of the external, and its inherent appetites are for the satisfaction and pleasures of that physical self.