Cosmic Consciousness
By Richard M. Bucke, M.D. ©1901
“A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind”
[Excerpt: his enlightenment experience.]
Updated:
May 18
5:54 pm
[Note: This is Bucke speaking about himself in third person voice, as was 19th Century fashion. —rp ]
At bottom: Caveat, Doctor Extraordinaire.
It was in the early spring, at the beginning of his thirty-sixth year [1873]. 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-colored cloud. For an instant he thought of a 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 Splendor which has ever since lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop of Brahmic Bliss, leaving thence-forward for always an aftertaste of Heaven. Among other things he did not 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 of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of everyone 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.
The illumination itself continued not more than a few moments, but its effects proved ineffaceable; it was impossible for him ever to forget what he at that time saw and knew; neither did he, or could he, ever doubt the truth of what was then presented to his mind. There was no return, that night or at any other time, of the experience...
The supreme occurrence of that night was his real and sole initiation to the new and higher order of ideas. But it was only an initiation. He saw the light but had no more idea whence it came and what it meant than had the first creature that saw the light of the sun. Years afterwards he met C. P., of whom he had often heard as having extraordinary spiritual insight. He found that C. P. had entered the higher life of which he had had a glimpse and had had large experience of its phenomena. His conversation with C. P. threw a flood of light upon the true meaning of what he had himself experienced.
Looking round then upon the world of man, he saw the significance of the subjective light in the case of Paul and in that of Mohammed. (Contact with) Whitman, J. H. J., J. B., ...Edward Carpenter, T. S. R., C. M. C., and M. C. L. assisted greatly in the broadening and clearing up of his speculations... But much time and labor were still required before the germinal concept could be satisfactorily elaborated and matured, the idea, namely, that there exists a family sprung from, living among, but scarcely forming a part of ordinary humanity, whose members are spread abroad throughout the advanced races of mankind and throughout the last forty centuries of the world’s history.
The trait that distinguishes these people from other men is this: Their spiritual eyes have been opened and they have seen. The better known members of this group who, were they collected together, could be accommodated all at one time in a modern drawing-room, have created all the great modern religions, beginning with Taoism and Buddhism, and speaking generally, have created, through religion and literature, modern civilization. Not that they have contributed any large numerical proportion of the books which have been written, but that they have produced the few books which have inspired the larger number of all that have been written in modern times. (Their light dominates modern knowing) as stars of the first magnitude dominate the midnight sky.
Doctor Extraordinaire: biographical notes on Bucke from 1946 preface by George M Acklom:Young Richard Maurice Bucke had practically no formal schooling. He was taught Latin by his father (who knew seven languages), and turned loose among the (thousands of his father’s) books to educate himself. ...
When he was seven years old his mother died, and his father soon married again; but in his seventeenth year, the stepmother also died, and Richard Maurice Bucke decided the time had come for him to set out and see more of the world than he could observe from a farm in the backwoods (outside Londson, Ontario). He went due south... into the States. For three long years ...doing odd jobs ...finally hired himself out as a driver in a wagon train of 26 wagons which was to cross the Plains to the western edge of the Mormon Territory...
...no permanent white settlements for the last 1200 miles... (crossing the Rockies on horseback and foot) Bucke and a companion traveled the last 150 miles on nothing but flour stirred into hot water.
(They) crossed the Great American Desert to the Carson River, and finally reached Gold Canyon. For a year a gold miner... met and became friends with the (silver-mine-hunting) Grosh brothers and their partner... Disaster overtook them (two dying and one joining) Bucke set out over the mountains (in winter) ...Bucke with both feet frozen was rescued at the last minute by a mining party. ...Bucke had to have the whole of one foot and part of the other amputated. ...he returned to life a young man of 21 so badly maimed that for the 40 years remaining to him he was never free from pain for more than a few hours at a time.
Now of age, he inherited his late mother’s small estate and used the money to put himself through McGill Medical School. ...he not only graduated high on the list, but took the prize for the best thesis. His postgraduate work was done in Europe. ...in 1864 he returned to Canada... marrying and settling down to raise a family...
...He was a matter-o-fact scientist on one side of his brain, but on the other he was a man of highly developed imaginative faculty and endowed with an enormous memory, especially for poetry of which he knew volumes by heart. His professional career was a distinguished one. In 1876 he was appointed Superintendent of the newly built Provincial Asylum for the Insane at Hamilton, Ontario... introducing many reforms in procedure which, though considered dangerously radical at the time, are now a matter of everyday method.