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Cosmic Consciousness by Ali Nomad

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

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It has been said that Madame Hanska, whom the author finally married only six months previous to his death, was the original of Seraphita, but it would seem that this great affection, tender and enduring as it was, partook far more of a beautiful friendship between two souls who knew and understood each other's needs, than it did of that blissful and ecstatic union of counterparts, which everywhere is described by those who have experienced it, as a sensation of _melting or merging into_ the other's being.

Seraphita is the embodiment, in human form, of the _idea_ expressed in the world-old belief in a perfected being; whose perfection was complete when the two halves of the _one_ should have found each other.

The inference is very generally made that Balzac believed in and sought to express the idea of a bi-sexual individual--a _personality_ who is complete in himself or herself _as a person_; one in which the intuitive, feminine principle and the reasoning, masculine principle had become perfectly balanced--in short, an androgynous human.

This idea is apparently further substantiated by the fact that Seraphita was loved by Minna, a beautiful young girl to whom Seraphita was always Seraphitus, an ideal lover; and by Wilfrid, to whom Seraphita represented his ideal of feminine loveliness, both in mind and body; a young girl possessing marvelous, almost miraculous, wisdom, but yet a woman with human passions and human virtues--his ideal of wifehood and motherhood.

But whatever the idea that Balzac intended to convey, whether, as is generally believed, Seraphita was an androgynous being, or whether she symbolized the perfection of soul-union, our contention is that this union is not a creation of the imagination, but the accomplishment of the plan of creation--the final goal of earthly pilgrimage; the raison d'etre of love itself.

One argument against the idea that Seraphita was intended to illustrate an androgynous being, rather than a perfected human, who had her spiritual mate, is found in the words in which she refused to marry Wilfrid, although Balzac makes it plainly evident that she was attracted to Wilfrid with a degree of sense-attraction, due to the fact that she was still living within the environment of the physical, and therefore subject to the illusions of the mortal, even while her spiritual consciousness was so fully developed as to enable her to perceive and realize the difference between an attraction that was based largely upon sense, and that which was of the soul.

Wilfrid says to her:

"Have you no soul that you are not seduced by the prospect of consoling a great man, who will sacrifice all to live with you in a little house by the border of a lake?"

"But," answers Seraphita, "I am loved with a love without bounds."

And when Wilfrid with insane anger and jealousy asked who it was whom Seraphita loved and who loved her, she answered "God."

At another time, when Minna, to whom she had often spoken in veiled terms of a mysterious being who loved her and whom she loved, asked her who this person was, she answered:

"I can love nothing here on earth."

"What dost thou love then?" asked Minna.

"Heaven" was the reply.

This obscurity and uncertainty as to what manner of love it was that absorbed Seraphita, and who was the object of it, could not have been possible had it been the usual devotion of the _religeuse_.

Seraphita, whose consciousness extended far beyond that of the people about her, could not have explained to her friends that the invisible realms were as real to her as the visible universe was to those with only sense-consciousness. It was impossible to explain to them that she had found and knew her mate, even though she had not met him in the physical body.