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“Cosmic Consciousness”
Title:Cosmic Consciousness Author:Bucke, Richard Maurice, MD Editor:- Review in brief: The
most universal, respected survey of enlightenment experiences. A timeless classic. Especially significant because
the author speaks from personal experience. Powerfully analyses similarities between scripturally reported experiences
such as Moses, Muhammad, St. Paul, Buddha and modern westerners such as Shakespeare, Whitman, and several unsung American
women. See full review for suggestions not to get bogged down in early chapters in which the doctor’s
great intellect is allowed to overshadow his still greater spiritual heart. |
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Full review:
Although now a century old, Dr. Bucke's volume is timeless because its topic is: the human quest for the experience of The Divine. Not written by a theologian but by an experiencer of the ultimate spiritual experience, this book describes Bucke’s own few seconds of illumination and the transformation it produced in his life; Bucke then proceeds to show commonalities among the experiences of numerous ancient (Lao Tse, Buddha, Moses, Christ, Paul, Muhammad, etc.), medieval-renaissance (Dante, Shakespeare, etc.), and modern (Ramakrishna, Whitman, etc). He documents the similarities among the experiences and explores the divergences among them — and the explicit and symbolic expressions these illuminati bequeathed to later generations.
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 (unsurprisingly, since for millenia they were largely barred from authorship), some of the most moving and persuasive accounts 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. Here is palpable sustenance for faith — offering us the calm assurance of those who have seen and who know — so unlike the phrenetic pronouncements of blind dogmatists who dominate modern mass media.
© Richard Pinneau, 2003 Your feedback is appreciated: rp(at)richardpinneau(dot)com |
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