INSTANCES OF ILLUMINATION AND ITS EFFECTS

The term Illumination seems a fitting description of the state of consciousness which is frequently alluded to as cosmic consciousness. Without the light of understanding, which is a spiritual quality, words themselves are meaningless. When the mind becomes Illumined the spirit of the word is clear and where before the meaning was clouded, or perhaps altogether obscured, there comes to the Illumined One a depth of comprehension undreamed of by the merely sense-conscious person.

If we consider the recorded instances of Illumination found among Occidentals, we will find that such extreme intensity of effort as that which is reported of Sri Ramakrishna, and other Oriental sages, does not appear.

It would seem that the late Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke of Toronto, Canada, was the first in this country to present a specific classification of what he termed the “new” consciousness, and to describe in some detail, he experience of himself and others, notably Walt Whitman.

Dr. Bucke’s first public exposition of these experiences was made at a congress of the British Medical Association in Montreal, Canada, in September of the year 1897. Dr. Bucke described this state of consciousness-a subject that seemed to him at that time to be a new one-in the following words:

“But of infinitely more importance than telepathy, and so-called spiritualism-no matter what explanation we give of these, or what their future is destined to be-is the final act here touched upon. This is, that superimposed upon self-consciousness as is that faculty upon simple consciousness, a third and higher form of consciousness is at present making its appearance in our race. This higher form of consciousness, when it appears, occurs as it must, at the full maturity of the individual, at or about the age of thirty-five, but almost always between the ages of thirty and forty. There have been occasional cases of it for the last two thousand years, and it is becoming more and more common. In fact, in all appearances, as far as observed, it obeys the laws to which every nascent faculty is subject. Many more or less perfect examples of this new faculty exist in the world to-day, and it has been my privilege to know personally and to have had the opportunity of studying, several men and women who have possessed it. In the course of a few more milléniums there should be born from the present human race, a higher type of man, possessing this higher type of consciousness. This new race, as it may well be called, would occupy toward us, a position such as that occupied by us toward the simple conscious ‘alulus homo.’ The advent of this higher, better and happier race, would simply justify the long agony of its birth through countless ages of our past. And it is the first article of my belief, some of the grounds for which I have endeavored to lay before you, that a new race is in course of evolution.”

At a subsequent date, having given the subject further consideration and having collected data corroborative of his former observations, Dr. Bucke said:

“I have, in the last three years, collected twenty-three cases of this so-called cosmic consciousness. In each case the onset or incoming of the new faculty is always sudden, instantaneous. Among the unusual feelings the mind experiences, is a sudden sense of being immersed in flame or in a brilliant light. This occurs entirely without worrying or outward cause, and may happen at noonday or in the middle of the night, and the person at first feels that he is becoming insane.

“Along with these feelings comes a sense of immortality; not merely a feeling of certainty that there is a future life,-that would be a small matter-but a pronounced consciousness that the life now being lived is eternal, death being seen as a trivial incident which does not affect its continuity.

“Further, there is annihilation of the sense of sin, and an intellectual competency, not simply surpassing the old plane, but on an entirely new and higher plane. The cosmic conscious race will not be the race that exists to-day, any more than the present is the same race that existed prior to the evolution of self-consciousness. A new race is being born from us, and this new race will in the near future, possess the earth.”

Dr. Bucke later published an article in a current magazine, illustrating the illumination of his friend Walt Whitman, and supplemented with an account of his own experience. We quote briefly from Dr. Bucke’s account of his own experience:

“I had spent the evening in a great city with some friends reading and discussing poetry and philosophy. We had occupied ourselves with Wordsworth, Shelley, Browning, and especially Whitman. We parted at midnight. I had a long drive in a hansom to my lodgings. My mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images and emotions called up by the reading and talk, was calm and peaceful. I was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actually thinking, but letting ideas, images and emotions flow of themselves, as it were, through my mind. All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city. The next moment I knew that the fire was within myself.”

While Dr. Bucke is unquestionably right in his estimate of the fact that “a new race is being born,” as he expresses it, there can scarcely be any question of individual age, in which the new consciousness may be expected. Physical maturity can have nothing whatever to do with the matter, since the acquisition of supra-consciousness is a matter of the maturity of the soul. This complètement of the cycle of the soul’s pilgrimage and service, may come at any age, as far as the physical body is concerned. Indeed, science records no definite age at which even physical maturity is invariably reached, although there is an approximate age.

A case recently widely commented upon was that of a child of six years who showed every symptom of senility or old age, which could hardly be possible without having passed what we call “maturity.”

Again, we find that some persons retain every indication of youth, both of mind and body, long after their contemporaries have reached and passed middle age. It is coming more and more to be admitted that age is relative, and that what we know as the relative is the effect of mental operations. Mental operations are subject to change-to enlargement.

The advent of cosmic consciousness is, therefore, not subject to what we know as time, as applied to physical development.

Nor should we speak of cosmic consciousness as an acquisition, but rather as a realization, since the consciousness is, at all times. It always has been, it will always be. Our relation to it changes, as we develop from the sense conscious to the self-conscious state and finally to what we term the “cosmic” conscious state. This latter must of necessity have been as yet only imperfectly realized, even by those of the Illuminati, who are known to the world as avatars and saviours.

Several instances of the possession of cosmic consciousness by children, are personally known to the writer. A well-known woman writer in America thus describes a succession of experiences in what were evidently conditions of cosmic consciousness, although as she said, she did not until many years later realize what had taken place.

Like Lord Alfred Tennyson, who tells of inducing in himself a state of spiritual ecstasy or liberation, by repeatedly intoning his own name, this lady acquired the habit of repeating in wonder and awe the name by which she was called in the household, which was an abbreviation of her baptismal name. The effect is best described in her own words:

“It seems to me that I never could quite become accustomed to hear myself addressed by name. When some member of the household would call me from study or play-even at the early age of five or six years-I would instantly be seized with a feeling of great and almost overwhelming awe and amazement, at the sound, which I knew was in some way associated with me.

“I found it extremely difficult to identity myself with that name, and often when alone would repeat the name over and over, trying to find a solution of the ‘why and wherefore.’

“At length this wonderment grew upon me to such an extent that I felt I must see this self of me that was called by a name.

“I acquired the habit of standing on a chair to gaze into the mirror above the chest of drawers in my mother’s bed-room, and putting my face close to the mirror, I would gaze and gaze into the eyes I saw there, and repeat over and over the name which seemed to me not to belong to that ’other self’ hidden behind those eyes. On one occasion I became quite entranced and fell from the chair, after which I refrained from looking into the mirror, although I did not for many years get over the feeling of wonderment at the sound of my own name, and many times, on repeating the name aloud, I would feel myself being lifted up into what seemed to me the clouds above my head, until I felt myself being ‘melted,’ as I termed it, into the moving cloud of soft transparent light.

“At this time I was between seven and eight years of age, and although I was far beyond children of my age, in my school studies, I was frequently admonished for being ‘stupid,’ owing to the fact that I could not remember the names of objects, nor could I be trusted on an errand.

“While walking from our house to the grocer’s, scarcely a block away, I would feel that sudden wonderment and awe of my name steal over me, and again I would be transported to some unknown, yet immanent region, utterly losing consciousness of my surroundings. I would sometimes awake to find myself standing before the counter of the grocery store, struggling to remember who and where I was, and what it was that I had been sent to that strange place for.”

This lady relates that she never dared to tell of her strange experiences, although she did not “outgrow” them until early womanhood, when she dropped the abbreviation of her name, and assumed her full baptismal name. Whether this latter fact had anything to do with the cessation of the experience is doubtful. At the same time, she declares that she can even now induce the same sensations, and transport herself into childhood again by repeating her childhood name.

The following extract from a paper published in London, England, in 1890, gives a description of an experience of a young man who had fallen into a condition which the physicians pronounced “catalepsy.” This young man was at the time a medical student, and had always exhibited a tendency to entrancement, or catalepsy. On recovering from one of these cataleptic attacks, and being asked to give a description of his sensations or experiences, the young man said:

“I felt a kind of soothing slumber stealing over me. I became aware that I was floating in a vast ocean of light and joy. I was here, there, and everywhere. I was everybody and everybody was I. I knew I was I, and yet I knew that I was much more than myself. Indeed, it seemed to me that there was no division. That all the universe was in me and I in it, and yet nothing was lost or swallowed up. Everything was alive with a joy that would never diminish.”

Such, in substance, was the attempt of this young man to describe what all who have experienced cosmic consciousness unite in saying is indescribable, for the very obvious reason that there are no words in which to express what is wordless, and inexpressible. This authentic account of a young man under twenty years of age, however, serves to prove that there is no special age of physical maturity in which the attainment of this state of consciousness may be expected.

This account was published seven years previous to Dr. Bucke’s statement, and yet, since it is not quoted in Dr. Bucke’s account, it is most unlikely that he had seen the article. Certainly the young man had never heard of the experience which Dr. Bucke later records, as “cosmic consciousness,” and yet the similarity of the experience, with the many which have been recorded is almost startling.

The salient point in this account, as in most of the others which have found their way into public print, is the feeling of being in perfect harmony and union with everything in the universe. “I was everything and everything was I,” said this young man, and again “I was here, there and everywhere at once,” he says in an effort to describe something which in the very nature of it, must be indescribable in terms of sense consciousness.

Illustrative of the connection between religious ecstasy and cosmic consciousness, we find the experience of an illiterate negro woman, a celebrated religious and anti-slavery worker of the early part of the last century.

This woman was known as “Sojourner Truth” and was at least forty years of age in 1817, when she was given her freedom under a law which freed all slaves in New York state, who had attained the age of forty years.

Sojourner Truth never learned to read or write, and her education consisted almost entirely of that presentation of religious truth which finds its most successful converts in revivalism.

With this fact in mind, nothing less than the attainment of a wonderful degree of spiritual consciousness could account for her marvelous power of description, and her ready flow of language, when “exhorting.”

Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote of her, in an article published in the Atlantic Monthly, as early as 1863:

“I do not recollect ever to have been conversant with any one who had more of that silent and subtle power which we call personal presence, than this woman. In the modern spiritualistic phraseology, she would be described as having a ‘strong sphere.’”

The wonderful mental endowment which seems to follow as a complement to the experience of Illumination, when not already present, as in the case of Whitman, for example, is characteristic of “Sojourner Truth,” or Isabella, as she was baptized.

Naturally, this mental power, seemingly inconsistent with her humble origin, and her unlettered condition, is evidenced along those lines which made up the sum and substance of her life. Judging her from the broader concept of philosophy, Isabella appears somewhat fanatical, but the influence of her life and work was so great, that Wendell Phillips wrote of her:

“I once heard her describe the captain of a slave ship going up to judgment, followed by his victims as they gathered from the depths of the sea, in a strain that reminded me of Clarence’s dream in Shakespeare, and equalled it. The anecdotes of her ready wit and quick striking replies are numberless. But the whole together give little idea of the rich, quaint, poetic and often profound speech of a most remarkable person, who used to say to us: ‘You read books; God Himself talks to me.’”

Isabella’s conviction that she had “talked to God,” was unshakable, and was, indeed, the dynamic force which moved her. She was accustomed to tell of the strange and startling experience in which she met God face to face, and in which she said to Him: “Oh, God, I didn’t know as you was so big.” In the New England Magazine for March, 1901, there was given a full account of the work of this noted negro woman. Commenting on her sense of awe of the immensity of God “when she met him,” the writer says:

“The consciousness of God’s presence was like a fire around her and she was afraid, till she began to feel that somebody stood between her and this brilliant presence; and after a while she knew that this somebody loved her. At first, she thought it must be Cato, a preacher whom she knew or Deencia or Sally-people who had been her friends.

“We are not told whether these persons were living or dead, or whether she thought they had come in the flesh, or in the spirit to her relief. However this may be, she soon perceived that their images looked vile and black and could not be the beautiful presence that shielded her from the fires of God. She began to experiment with her inner vision, and found that when she said to the presence ‘I know you, I know you,’ she perceived a light; but when she said ‘I don’t know you,’ the light went out.

“At last, she became aware that it was Jesus who was shielding her and loving her, and the world grew bright, her troubled thoughts were banished, and her heart was filled with praise and with love for all creatures. ‘Lord, Lord,’ she cried, ‘I can love even de white folks.’”

The question will legitimately arise here, as to the authenticity of an experience in which Jesus is said to be personally guiding and shielding her, but it must be remembered that the mind is the medium through which the spiritual realization must be expressed and, as has been stated previously, the description of the phenomenon of Illumination, particularly when experienced in a sudden influx must partake of the character of the mind of the illumined one.

William James, late professor of Psychology of Harvard University, in his exhaustive book The Varieties of Religious Experiences, in the chapter on “The Value of Saintliness,” says:

“Now in the matter of intellectual standards, we must bear in mind that it is unfair, where we find narrowness of mind, always to impute it as a vice to the individual for in religious and theological matters, he probably absorbs his narrowness from his generation. Moreover, we must not confound the essentials of saintliness with its accidents, which are the special determination of these passions at any historical moment. In these determinations the saints will usually be loyal to the temporary idols of their tribe.”

Applying this explanation to the case of “Sojourner Truth,” we may realize that the literal conception of Jesus as her guide and shield, was a mental image, inevitable with her, as Jesus was the motive power of her every thought and act. And although at the moment of her Illumination, she realized the “bigness” of God, later, in arranging and recording the phenomenon, in her mental note-book, she tabulated it with all she knew of God-the religious enthusiasm of her work of conversion to the religion of Jesus.

Says James, commenting upon the question of conversion in human experience: and this tendency to what seems a narrow and limited viewpoint:

“If you open the chapter on ‘Association,’ of any treatise on Psychology, you will read that a man’s ideas, aims and objects form diverse internal groups, and systems, relatively independent of one another. Each ‘aim’ which he follows awakens a certain specific kind of interested excitement, and gathers a certain group of ideas together in subordination to it as its associates.”

It is perhaps natural to assume that most instances of the attainment of Illumination, have been inseparable from religious devotion, or at least contemplative mysticism. This view is held almost exclusively by Orientals, and seems to have been shared to a great extent by western commentators upon the subject.

A notable example among Occidentals, bearing the religious aspect, and one which is important from the fact that the person detailing his experience, was a man of mental training, is the case of Rev. Charles G. Finney, formerly president of Oberlin College.

In his “Memoirs,” Dr. Finney describes what Orthodox Christians generally call the “baptism of the Holy Spirit”:

“I had retired to a back room for prayer,” writes Dr. Finney, “and there was no fire or light in the room; nevertheless it appeared to me as if it were perfectly light. As I went in and shut the door after me, it seemed as if I met the Lord Jesus Christ face to face. It did not occur to me then nor did it for some time afterwards, that it was wholly a mental state.

“On the contrary, it seemed to me a reality, that he stood before me and I fell down at his feet and poured out my soul to him. I wept aloud like a child and made such confessions as I could with choked utterance.

“It seemed to me that I bathed his feet with my tears, and yet I had no distinct impression that I touched him, that I recollect. As I turned and was about to take my seat, I received a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost.

“Without any expectation, without even having the thought in my mind, that there was any such thing for me, without any recollection that I had ever heard the thing mentioned, by any person in the world, the Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner that seemed to go through me body and soul.

“I could feel the impression like the waves of electricity going through me and through me. Indeed, it seemed to come in waves of liquid love. For I could not express it in any other way. It seemed like the very breath of God. I can recollect distinctly that it seemed to fan me like immense wings. No words can express the wonderful love that was shed abroad in my heart.

“I wept aloud with joy and love. These waves came over me, and over me, one after the other, until I recollect that I cried out, ’I shall die if these waves continue to pass over me.’ I said ’Lord, I cannot bear any more.’”

We will note, that although Dr. Finney says that he could not remember ever having heard the thing mentioned by any person, yet he felt “the baptism of the Holy Spirit.” It is practically impossible that Dr. Finney could have lived in an age and a community which was essentially strict in its Orthodoxy, without having heard of the phrase “baptism of the Holy Spirit,” even though the words had escaped his immediate recollection. However, the point that characterizes Dr. Finney’s experience, in common with all others, is that of seeing an intense light, and of the realization of the overwhelming force of love.

The relation of this experience to a creed or system of religion, is something which, we believe, may be accounted for, as Professor James has said, on the fact of “historical determination.”

Until very recently, the idea that spirituality was impossible save in connection with religious systems, and rigid discipline, has been quite general.

In the case of Dr. Finney, we find that all his life previous to this experience he had been noted for his simplicity and child-like trust. Following his Illumination we learn that he became a man of great influence, and power, because of “the wonderful humanity which he radiated.”

Similar in experience, in its effects, is a case related by Theodore F. Seward, the well-known American philanthropist, Mr. Seward relates the following story:

“The strange experience which I here relate came to a friend whom I knew intimately, and from whose lips I received the account. It is a lady in middle life, who has for years been an earnest seeker for truth and spiritual light. She was alone in her room sewing.

“Thinking, as was her wont, of spiritual things and feeling a strong sense of the presence and power of God, she suddenly had a consciousness of being surrounded by a brilliant white light, which seemed to radiate from her person. The light continued for some minutes, and at the same time, she felt a great spiritual uplifting and an enlargement of her mental powers, as if the limitations of the body were transcended, and her soul’s capacities were in a measure set free for the moment. The experience was unique, above and beyond the ordinary current of human life, and while the vision or impression passed away, a permanent effect was produced upon her mind. She had never heard the term ‘cosmic consciousness,’ and did not know that the subject it covers is beginning to be discussed.”

It must be noted that in these experiences, the idea most strongly felt was the one of the “power and presence of God,” and we are impressed with the fact that, no matter how varied may be the creeds of the world, as founded by “saviours” and incarnations of God, there is a unity among all races, as to the fact of a one supreme universal power, which is Aum, the Absolute, and which must represent perfect love and perfect peace, since all who have glimpsed their unity with this power, testify to a feeling of happiness, peace and satisfaction, rare and exalted.

By comparing the experience of those who have attained this state of liberation from illusion, through religious rites and ceremonies, or “sacrifice to God,” as it is not infrequently called, with the experience of those who have recorded the phenomenon, apparently arriving at the goal through intellectual and moral aspiration, we will find that the results are almost identical, and the after-effects similar.

It has been said that those who attain liberation have invariably sought to found a new system of worship, and this fact has given rise to the many paths or methods of attainment which have been taught by various Illumined Ones, both in the Orient and in the western world, supplementary as it were to the main great religious systems.

We will take a short survey of a few of these systems in Japan and India in comparatively modern times, or at least during the last two thousand years, which is modern compared to the history of the Orient.