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Cosmic Consciousness by Ali Nomad

XIII MODERN EXAMPLES OF INTELLECTUAL COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS: EMERSON; TOLSTOI; BALZAC

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Bucke comments upon his decision against the state of matrimony, because, as Balzac himself declared, it would be an obstacle to the perfectibility of his interior senses, and to his flight through the spiritual worlds, and says: "When we consider the antagonistic attitude of so many of the great cases toward this relation (Gautama, Jesus, Paul, Whitman, etc.), there seems little doubt that anything like general possession of cosmic consciousness must abolish marriage as we know it to-day."

Balzac explains this seeming aversion to the marriage state _as we know it to-day_, in his two books, written during his early thirties, namely, Louis Lambert and Seraphita. "Louis Lambert" is regarded as in the nature of an autobiography, since Balzac, like his mouthpiece, Louis, viewed everything from an inner sense--from intuition, or the soul faculties, rather than from the standard of mere intellectual observation, analysis and synthesis. This inner sense, so real and so thoroughly understandable to those possessing it, is almost, if not quite, impossible of description to the complete comprehension of those who have no intimate relationship with this inner vision. To the person who views life from the inner sense, the soul sense (which is the approach to, and is included in, cosmic consciousness), the external or physical life is like a mirror reflecting, more or less inaccurately, the reality--the soul is the gazer, and the visible life is what he sees.

Balzac expresses this view in all he says and does. "All we are is in the soul," he says, and the perfection or the imperfection of what we externalize, depends upon the development of the soul.

It is this marvelously developed inner vision that makes marriage, on the sense-conscious plane, which is the plane upon which we know marriage as it is to-day, objectionable to Balzac.

His spirit had already united with its spiritual counterpart, and his soul sought the embodiment of that union in the flesh. This he did not find in the perfection and completeness which from his inner view he knew to exist.

Barriers of caste, or class; of time and space; of age; of race and color; of condition; may intervene between counterparts on the physical plane; nay, one may be manifesting in the physical body and the other have abandoned the body, but as there is neither time nor space nor condition to the spirit, this union may have been sought and found, and _reflected to_ the mortal consciousness, in which case marriage with anything less than the _one_ true counterpart would be unsatisfactory, if not altogether objectionable.

With this view in mind, Seraphita becomes as lucid a bit of reading as anything to be found in literature.

Seraphita is the perfected being--the god into which man is developing, or more properly speaking, _unfolding_, since man must unfold into that from which he started, but with consciousness added.

Everywhere, in ancient and modern mysticism, we find the assumption that God is dual--male and female. The old Hebrew word for God is plural--Elohim.

Humankind invariably and persistently, even though half-mockingly, alludes to man and wife as "one"; and men and women speak of each other, when married, as "my other half."

That which persists has a basis in fact, and symbolizes the perfect type. What we know of marriage as it is to-day, proves to us beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the man-made institution of marriage does not make man and woman one, nor insure that two halves of the same whole are united. The highest type of men and women to-day are at best but half-gods, but these are prophecies of the future race, "the man-god whom we await" as Emerson puts it. But that which we await is the man-woman-god, the Perfected Being, of whom Balzac writes in Seraphita.