Cosmic Consciousness: The Man-God Whom We Await

by Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall

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 Cæsar the things that are Cæsar'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.