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Cosmic Consciousness by Ali Nomad

XIV ILLUMINATION AS EXPRESSED IN THE POETICAL TEMPERAMENT

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Compared to the religious aspect of cosmic consciousness in which, previous to the time of Illumination, the devotee had striven to rise to spiritual heights through disdaining the flesh, this note of Whitman's is a new note--the nothingness of evil as such; the righteousness of the flesh and the holiness of earthly, or human, love, bespeaks the prophet of the New Dispensation; the time hinted of by Jesus, the Master, when he said, "when the twain shall be one and the outside as the inside," as a sign and symbol of the blessed time to come when the kingdom he spoke of (not his personal kingdom, but the kingdom which he represented, the kingdom of Love), should come upon earth.

Whitman's illumination is essentially poetic; not that it is not also intellectual and moral; but after his experience--at least an experience more notable than any hitherto recorded by him, in or about his thirty-fifth year--we find his conversation invariably reflecting the beauty and poetical imagery of his mind. He may be said to have lived and moved and had his being in a state of blissful unconsciousness of anything unclean or impure, or unnatural.

This absence of _consciousness of evil_ is in no wise synonymous with a type of person who _exalts_ his undeveloped animal tendencies under the guise of liberation from a sense of sin. Neither is this discrimination easy of attainment to any but those who _realize_ in their own hearts the very distinct difference between the nothingness of sin and the pretended acceptance of perversions as purity.

While we are on this point we must again emphasize the truth that cosmic consciousness cannot be gained by prescription; there is no royal road to _mukti_. Liberation from the lower _manas_ can not be bought or sold, it can not be explained or comprehended, save by those to whom the attainment of such a state is at least _possible_ if not _probable_.

Illustrative of his sense of unity with all life (one of the most salient characteristics of the fully cosmic conscious man), are these lines of Whitman's:

"Voyaging to every port, to dicker and adventure; Hurrying with the modern crowd, as eager and fickle as any; Hot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him; Solitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me a long while; Walking the hills of Judea, with the beautiful gentle God by my side; Speeding through space--speeding through Heaven and the stars."

Oriental mysticism tells us that one of the attributes of the liberated one is the power to read the hearts and souls of all men; to feel what they feel; and to so unite with them in consciousness that we _are_ for the time being the very person or thing we contemplate. If this be indeed the test of godhood, Whitman expresses it in every line:

"The disdain and calmness of olden martyrs; The mother condemned for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on; The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, covered with sweat; The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck--the murderous buckshot and the bullets; All these I feel, or am."

Seeking to express the sense of knowing and especially of _feeling_, and the bigness and broadness of life, the scorn of petty aims and strife; in short, that interior perception which Illumination brings, he says:

"Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? have you reckoned the earth much?
Have you practised so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems;
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun--there are millions of suns left;
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books;
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me;
You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from yourself.
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end;
But I do not talk of the beginning nor the end.