The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human NatureJames, William
ReligionComparative
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
James, William
Conversion; Experience (Religion); Philosophy and religion; Psychology, Religious; Religion
what I knew would be the adverse judgment of the world. It was in
the most real seasons that the Real Presence came, and I was aware
that I was immersed in the infinite ocean of God.”(240)
Even the least mystical of you must by this time be convinced of the
existence of mystical moments as states of consciousness of an entirely
specific quality, and of the deep impression which they make on those who
have them. A Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. R. M. Bucke, gives to the more
distinctly characterized of these phenomena the name of cosmic
consciousness. “Cosmic consciousness in its more striking instances is
not,” Dr. Bucke says, “simply an expansion or extension of the self‐
conscious mind with which we are all familiar, but the superaddition of a
function as distinct from any possessed by the average man as
_self_‐consciousness is distinct from any function possessed by one of the
higher animals.”
“The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is a
consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the
universe. Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs
an intellectual enlightenment which alone would place the
individual on a new plane of existence—would make him almost a
member of a new species. To this is added a state of moral
exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation, and
joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense, which is fully as
striking, and more important than is the enhanced intellectual
power. With these come what may be called a sense of immortality,
a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall
have this, but the consciousness that he has it already.”(241)
It was Dr. Bucke’s own experience of a typical onset of cosmic
consciousness in his own person which led him to investigate it in others.
He has printed his conclusions in a highly interesting volume, from which
I take the following account of what occurred to him:—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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