Richard Maurice Bucke

Our descendants will sooner or later reach, as a race, the condition of cosmic consciousness, just as, long ago, our ancestors passed from simple consciousness into self consciousness.

Only a personal experience of it, or a prolonged study of men who have passed into the new life, will enable us to realize what this actually is; but it has seemed to the present writer that to pass in review, even briefly and imperfectly, …

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.

Cosmic Consciousness is a third form which is as far above Self Consciousness as is that above Simple Consciousness. With this form, of course, both simple and self consciousness persist (as simple consciousness persists when self …

Cosmic Consciousness … is a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary man.

Only a little while now and we shall be again together and with us those other noble and well-beloved souls gone before. I am sure I shall meet you and them; that you and I shall talk of a thousand things and of that unforgettable day and …

It is alone that part of the external universe which we call material which acts on man through his senses — that part of which we ordinarily feel our knowledge to be the surest; but in reality, strangely enough, as will soon appear, this …

Man reacts upon and toward the external universe in three ways, namely, by his active nature ; by his intellectual nature ; by his moral nature — that is, he acts upon it, thinks about it, and feels toward it.

All things, man included, are parts of one great whole. The object of this chapter is to point out the most obvious and most natural divisions of this whole, which we call the universe. These divisions can never be absolute; the whole is …

I dedicate this book to the man who inspired it — to the man who of all men past and present that I have known has the most exalted moral nature — to Walt Whitman.