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Cosmic Consciousness by Ali Nomad

XV METHODS OF ATTAINMENT: THE WAY OF ILLUMINATION

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"Thereafter, the whole personal being bends toward illumination, full of the spirit of Eternal Life."

Here again, we have assurance that the spiritually-conscious man, the "luminous body" is not a being apart from the self that we know our inner nature to be, but rather it _is_ the inner Self even as we in our ignorance and our lack of initiation, know it, raised to a higher realm of consciousness; our desires refined, spiritualized, made pure, and our faculties strengthened and immortalized. We do not withdraw from experience but we draw from Experience the _lesson_--the hidden wisdom of the initiate.

_Meditate upon these sutras._

"He who, after he has attained, is wholly free from self, is set in a cloud of holiness which is called Illumination. This is the true spiritual consciousness."

This aphorism is self-explanatory. He who attains illumination, and afterward lives and acts from the inner consciousness--the _spiritual man_, is free from the desires of the sense-conscious life, with its consequent disappointments; he sees everything from the spiritual, rather than the mental point of view, and understands the phrase "and behold, all was good."

"_Thereon comes surcease from sorrow and the burden of toil._"

The one who has attained cosmic consciousness, acting always from the Self, and not from personal desires, is set free from karma; he has fulfilled the cycle; he makes no more bondage for himself; he is free and is already immortal.

"When that condition of consciousness is reached, which is far-reaching, and not confined to the body, which is outside the body and not conditioned by it, then the veil which conceals the light is worn away."

The acquisition of spiritual consciousness, Illumination, endows the mortal mind also, with a degree of power sufficient to penetrate the veil of illusion--the _maya_; the disciple then sees for the first time, all things in their true light. The separation between the personal self, and the spiritual being that we are, is so fine as to be like a cob-web veil, and yet how few penetrate it. The suddenness with which this awakening (for it is like awakening from a dream of the senses), comes, startles and surprises us, and then we become astonished at the transparency of the bonds that bound us to the limitations of the mortal, when we might have soared to realms of light.

"By perfectly concentrated meditation on the correlation of the body with the ether, and by thinking of it as light as thistle-down, will come the power to traverse the ether."

The Zens say that the way of the gods is through the air and afterwards in the ether. This means that we must evolve from the physical to the psychic, and thence to the etheric or spiritual body. This is the way of the many. It is only the few who attain to perfect spiritual consciousness while manifesting in the physical, but these do not have to undergo "the second death" which is the dropping off of the psychic body, and assuming the spiritual body. They attain to immortality _in the flesh_, (i.e., in the present personality).

"Thereupon will come the manifestation of the atomic and other powers, which are the endowment of the body, together with its unassailable force."

The body here referred to, it must be borne in mind, is the etheric or spiritual body, which possesses the power to disintegrate matter; the power to annihilate time and space; so that he may look backward into remote antiquity and forward into boundless futurity; or as the commentator says, "he can touch the moon with the tip of his finger"; the power of levitation and limitless extension; the power of command; the power of creative will.