Cosmic Consciousness

By Richard Maurice Bucke

Book Overview

There is an ages-old unexplained mystery of genius and enlightenment. Many people talk of "seeing the light" as a temporary, intense affair where all the world's knowledge and understanding is... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0525472452
• ISBN13: 9780525472452
• Release Date: December 1969
• Publisher: Plume
• Length: 1 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.0" x 1.0" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

A true work of divinty

This book remains pioneering and a true one and only. It is as valuable today as it was when it was first published over 100 years ago and will remain valuable for many, many, many years to come, despite the fact that some of the author's views and information is clearly dated. (What sacred work isn't?) The message is timeless and I actually find the dated quality to be part of it's charm; bringing us back to inspiring days at the forefront of modern science, technology, and modern thought, and the days when Darwin's works were still seen as quite new. What is most unique about this book is the author's illuminating and still modern approach; psychological, analytical and scientific, -we feel we can understand him in plain English and without blind faith or obedience- yet fused with the most inspiring mysticism the world has ever known or seen. The result is simply, that he gets his magnificent point and theory across with inspiring, vivid clarity and the implications are quite astounding to the reader if not wholly awesome. Indeed, the picture that this book creates is much greater than the sum it's parts. Don't be fooled by the fact that the title "Cosmic Consciousness"(the term the book itself coined) has been swooped up through the years by weirdo's, kooks and new age charlatans. This is NOT that. Nor is it some cold, "rational" and "scientific" look at spirituality that will leave you doubting, depressed and without meaning. This book and what it can still teach is truly a work of divinity - or at least inspired truly by it to an educated, esteemed doctor, but altogether ordinary man. (You don't feel you are being talked down to, more like listening to your very smart friend.) The only sad thing is that the author's own experience of cosmic consciousness is mentioned only briefly in the opening notes. What else might he have been able to tell us if he had not died so soon after it was published? I believe surely he would have continued his work. Also sad, is that many of his "lesser, imperfect and doubtful" cases are named only with initials (J.B.B. etc.) -to protect their identities as they were still living. What else might we also have learned knowing more about these people? Or what contributions have they already made that we do not realize? Once again I will say it, one feels Bucke's work should and/or could be updated, revised, or continued to the current day . . . but maybe that's not the point, because what it will give you despite all that is truly divine. P.S. Yes, I myself have had experiences of `cosmic consciousness.'

The pioneering book on enlightenment episodes

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

Timeless Spirituality with the Authority of Experience

Although now a century old, Dr. Bucke's volume is timeless because its topic is: the human quest for the experience of The Divine.Written, not by a theologian but by an experiencer of the Ultimate Mystical Experience, this book describes Bucke's own few seconds of illumination, then goes on to show commonalities among the experiences of the ancient (Lao Tse, Buddha, Christ, Paul, Muhammad, etc.), medieval-renaissance (Dante, Shakespeare, etc.), and modern (Ramakrishna, Whitman, etc). The intellectual credentials of this neurologist cause Bucke's work to stand head-and-shoulders above popular "New Age" mystic reports.Be sure not to miss Bucke's description of his own experience (humbly buried in introductory notes), and don't get bored by reading his analytical sections on the nature of consciousness. Dive into the excerpts of how writers have struggled through the ages to express their inexpressible experiences of Divine Love, Brahmic Ecstasy, Rapture... variously named in different times and cultures.Although women are under-represented (naturally, since for millenia they've largely been barred from authorship), some of the most movingly personal experiences are those near the end of the volume by three 19th Century women.The power of this gem stems from its first-hand reports of enlightenment - with its unpredictable, highly personal expressions. You'll find God experienced here not as an anthropomorphic Jehovah, but as a living Presence; not sterilized by intellectual analysis, but revered in Its humanity-divinity. Most helpfully, Bucke shows the parallels between different saints/illuminati/authors in their experiences and in their ways of describing it. I tell my students that if they were to be sentenced to live out the rest of their lives on a desert island with only five books: Make this one of the five!

A Fascinating Study of Parallels

Richard Maurice Bucke was a superintendant for a Canadian mental hospital, a medical doctor, and, most famously, Walt Whitman's friend, doctor, first biographer, and literary executor. It's in his connection with Whitman, and William James, that I first came to this fascinating study that reveals a great deal not only about a particular kind of religious phenomena, but of Bucke's attempt to make sense of and provide context for his own mystical experience.The science of "Cosmic Consciousness" is pure late-1890's, and has some uncomfortable Victorian assumptions (about the relative "development" of the races, for instance): but what is really fascinating is Bucke's drive to find parallels in texts and biographies. From his own experience (to be found in James' _Varieties_, a pattern emerges that he finds spread throughout history. Bucke's almost literal worship of Whitman (upon Whitman's death, Bucke wrote to a fellow friend of Whitman that "the Christ has died again") will likely strike readers as somewhere between touching and ridiculous, as might Bucke's evolutionary / materialist explanatory structure. But for the student of mysticism, Bucke's novel approach, (freeing the study of religious experience from religion, as it were, and presenting parallels to speak for themselves) will show itself to have been very influential indeed: from William James' seminal religious psychology to Freud to a thousand "new age" texts, Bucke this book (never long out of print since its original publication) has influenced the direction of the studies that came after.