Cosmic Consciousness: The Man-God Whom We Await

by Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall

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.