The New Thought preachment of physical immortality is but a faint and imperfect perception of this time, when "there shall be no death," because the animal man, subject to change, shall give place to the changeless, deathless, spiritual man; not through cataclysms, and destruction, but through the natural birth into a higher consciousness.
The Occidental mind is easily affrighted by a name. Perhaps we should not specify the Occidental mind, but rather the mind of man among all races is easily put to sleep by the hypnotism of a word.
The word Pantheism is a bugaboo to the Occidentalist. He fears the destruction of the Monistic faith, if he admits that man is in essence a god, and that therefore there are many gods in the one God, even as there are many members to the one physical organism.
Nevertheless all literature, whether sacred or profane, teaches the attainment of godhood by Man. This can not mean other than the attainment of realization of godhood, by the individual and the retention of this realization to the end that reincarnation shall cease and identity with the cosmic, principle, be established, beyond further loss, or doubt, or strife, or death.
This is what it means to attain to cosmic consciousness. It is inclusive consciousness. It is not absorption into the vast unknown, in the sense of annihilation of identity. It is consciousness plus, not minus.
An ancient writing says:
"And thou shalt awake as from a long dream. Thou shalt be like the perfume arising from the flower in which it has been so long enclosed. And thou wilt float above the opened flower. And thou wilt say 'There is time before me in eternity.'"
There is nothing in the testimony of those who have described, as best they could, their emotions upon attainment of this consciousness, which would argue the absorption of the individual soul into The Absolute.
There is no testimony to argue that the attainment of cosmic consciousness, carries with it anything approaching annihilation of sentiency.
Rather it would seem to testify to an acceleration of all the higher faculties.