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Cosmic Consciousness by Ali Nomad

XIV ILLUMINATION AS EXPRESSED IN THE POETICAL TEMPERAMENT

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Poetry is the natural language of cosmic consciousness. "The music of the spheres" is a literal expression, as all who have ever _glimpsed_ the beauties of the spiritual realms will testify.

"Poets are the trumpets which sing to battle. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," said Shelley.

Not that all poets are aware, in their mortal consciousness, of their divine mission, or of their spiritual glimpses.

The outer mind, the mortal or carnal mind--that part of our organism whose office it is to take care of the physical body, for its preservation and its well-being, may be so dominant as, to hold in bondage the _atman_, but it can not utterly silence its voice.

Thus the true poet is also a seer; a prophet; a spiritually-conscious being, for such time, or during such phases of inspiration, as he becomes imbued with the spirit of poetry.

A person who writes rhymes is not necessarily a poet. So, too, there are poets who do not express their inspirations according to the rules of metre and syntax.

Between that which Balzac tabulated as the "abstractive" type of human evolvement and that which is fully cosmic in consciousness, there are many and diverse degrees of the higher faculties; but the poet always expresses some one of these degrees of the higher consciousness; indeed some poets are of that versatile nature that they run the entire gamut of the emotional nature, now descending to the ordinary normal consciousness which takes account only of the personal self; again ascending to the heights of the impersonal fearlessness and unassailable confidence that is the heritage of those who have reached the full stature of the "man-god whom we await"--the cosmic conscious race that is to be.

All commentators upon modern instances of Illumination unite in regarding Walt Whitman as one of the most, if not _the most_, perfect example of whom we have any record of cosmic consciousness and its sublime effects upon the character and personality of the illumined one.

Whitman is a sublime type for reasons which are of first importance in their relation to character as viewed from the ideals of the cosmic conscious race-to-be.

Moralists have criticized Whitman as immoral; religionists have deplored his lack of a religious creed; literary critics have denied his claim to high rank in the world of literature; but Walt Whitman is unquestionably without a peer in the roundness of his genius; in the simplicity of his soul; in the catholicity of his sympathy; in the perfect poise and self-control and imperturbability of his kindness. His biographers agree as to his never-failing good nature. He was without any of those fits of unrest and temperamental eccentricities which are supposed to be the "sign manual" of the child of the poetic muse.

In Whitman it would seem that all those petty prejudices against any nationality or class of men, were entirely absent. He exalted the common-place, not as a pose, nor because he had given himself to that task, but because to him there was no common-place. In the cosmic perception of the universe, everything is exalted to the plane of _fitness_. As to the pure all things are pure, so to the one who is steeped in the sublimity of Divine Illumination, there is no high or low, no good or bad, no white or black, or rich or poor; all--all is a part of the plan, and, in its place in cosmic evolution, it _fits_.

Whitman cries:

"All! all! Let others ignore what they may, I make the poem of evil also, I commemorate that part also; I am myself just as much evil as good, and my nation is, and I say there, is in fact no evil."