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Cosmic Consciousness by Ali Nomad

V INSTANCES OF ILLUMINATION AND ITS EFFECTS

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"I felt a kind of soothing slumber stealing over me. I became aware that I was floating in a vast ocean of light and joy. I was here, there, and everywhere. I was everybody and everybody was I. I knew I was I, and yet I knew that I was much more than myself. Indeed, it seemed to me that there was no division. That all the universe was in me and I in it, and yet nothing was lost or swallowed up. Everything was alive with a joy that would never diminish."

Such, in substance, was the attempt of this young man to describe what all who have experienced cosmic consciousness unite in saying is indescribable, for the very obvious reason that there are no words in which to express what is wordless, and inexpressible. This authentic account of a young man under twenty years of age, however, serves to prove that there is no special age of physical maturity in which the attainment of this state of consciousness may be expected.

This account was published seven years previous to Dr. Bucke's statement, and yet, since it is not quoted in Dr. Bucke's account, it is most unlikely that he had seen the article. Certainly the young man had never heard of the experience which Dr. Bucke later records, as "cosmic consciousness," and yet the similarity of the experience, with the many which have been recorded is almost startling.

The salient point in this account, as in most of the others which have found their way into public print, is the feeling of being in perfect harmony and union with everything in the universe. "I was everything and everything was I," said this young man, and again "I was here, there and everywhere at once," he says in an effort to describe something which in the very nature of it, must be indescribable in terms of sense consciousness.

Illustrative of the connection between religious ecstasy and cosmic consciousness, we find the experience of an illiterate negro woman, a celebrated religious and anti-slavery worker of the early part of the last century.

This woman was known as "Sojourner Truth" and was at least forty years of age in 1817, when she was given her freedom under a law which freed all slaves in New York state, who had attained the age of forty years.

Sojourner Truth never learned to read or write, and her education consisted almost entirely of that presentation of religious truth which finds its most successful converts in revivalism.

With this fact in mind, nothing less than the attainment of a wonderful degree of spiritual consciousness could account for her marvelous power of description, and her ready flow of language, when "exhorting."

Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote of her, in an article published in the Atlantic Monthly, as early as 1863:

"I do not recollect ever to have been conversant with any one who had more of that silent and subtle power which we call personal presence, than this woman. In the modern spiritualistic phraseology, she would be described as having a 'strong sphere.'"

The wonderful mental endowment which seems to follow as a complement to the experience of Illumination, when not already present, as in the case of Whitman, for example, is characteristic of "Sojourner Truth," or Isabella, as she was baptized.

Naturally, this mental power, seemingly inconsistent with her humble origin, and her unlettered condition, is evidenced along those lines which made up the sum and substance of her life. Judging her from the broader concept of philosophy, Isabella appears somewhat fanatical, but the influence of her life and work was so great, that Wendell Phillips wrote of her:

"I once heard her describe the captain of a slave ship going up to judgment, followed by his victims as they gathered from the depths of the sea, in a strain that reminded me of Clarence's dream in Shakespeare, and equalled it. The anecdotes of her ready wit and quick striking replies are numberless. But the whole together give little idea of the rich, quaint, poetic and often profound speech of a most remarkable person, who used to say to us: 'You read books; God Himself talks to me.'"