Cosmic Consciousness, Reality (and UFOs)

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

Not to get too far adrift, and in conjunction with Jose Caravaca’s “Distortion Theory,” I’d like to address the concept of Cosmic Consciousness that often intrudes here, as part of the conjectural tone.

Maurice Bucke’s masterwork, Cosmic Consciousness:  A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind [E.P. Dutton and Company, Inc. NY, 1901/1923] is and has been a seminal work for me.

Bucke tells his readers, in Part I First Words that Cosmic Consciousness is “a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by ordinary man.” [Page 1]

Of course he elaborates on that simple definition, and while the concept has been grist for many later CC interpreters (which, if deconstruction were still fashionable would be suitable here), I’ll stick to Jacques Derrida’s plea (in Literature in Secret) to stick with the original work, unsullied by later accruing remarks and debate.

Every polymath and intellectual wannabe have provided their take on Cosmic Consciousness, but it is only Bucke’s insightful work that matters. And what he proposed in 1901 was that certain individuals had, some time in their life, experienced a vision or episode that showed them a reality beyond the “ordinary” reality we call life.

Among the fourteen persons Bucke cites as having that vision (a Cosmic Consciousness episode) are Gautama the Buddha, Jesus the Christ, St. Paul, Plotinus, Mohammed, Dante, Francis Bacon, William Blake, Balzac, and Walt Whitman.

Bucke doesn’t include Thomas Aquinas, who Bryan Sentes referred to recently; Thomas, allegedly seen floating in front of an altar and afterward saying what he had seen (in his vision) made all that he had written as straw in the wind.

Aquinas never told what he had experienced, nor had anyone listed by Bucke in his fourteen CC personages.

Apparently what these individuals saw (experienced) was so profound that it eluded description,

Recently it was noted by some celebrity mavens that former Beatle Paul McCartney, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, says he saw God. (Bryan Sentes will like that.)

(Now what exactly did McCartney see? God is ineffable, beyond comprehension, unknowable, and according to Scripture, looking upon the Face of God is a death sentence. McCartney is blubbering.)

But, it seems, some persons do have occasion to view some other kind of reality, one that Bucke and others (Plato among them) offer as an experience that provides a profound glimpse of the real reality that encompasses our existence.

(Jose Caravaca is fleshing out his views about intercessions from that other real reality.)

The illumination brought to humans by Cosmic Consciousness is also what I call the madness of schizophrenics or other “insane” manifestations that are treated as mental illness only because the persons afflicted have not been or are not able to articulate what they have seen or experienced, most succumbing to a withdrawal from normal behavior, so traumatized are they by the vision(s) or voices they perceive.

Now, my point, which I appear to have distanced myself from, is that UFOs are part of this other reality (as Caravaca suggests) and as others have surmised, without pursuing the matter seriously.

Yes, it seems that the other reality, the real reality of Plato, intrudes on and in our lives, but only to the extent that we see (or feel) a hint of that reality.

Bucke, in his Chapter 6, [Page 267 of my book] writes about the phenomenon. The “sign,” the “voice,” “god,” or “demon” and notes that Socrates, who had the “Cosmic Sense” was considered by French writer F. Lelut (who considered all mystics as lunatics) as “insane” from the siege of Potidæa, 429 B.C.

This is how many considered to be mentally ill (insane or mad), and those who’ve seen a UFO or reported a UFO sighting, are perceived by “normal” folks.

But person in the throes of madness and UFO spotters are merely experiencing a dose of another reality. (This is what Jose Caravaca is getting at.)

And let me close by saying that those who see psychedelic drugs or hallucinogens as a doorway to a Cosmic Consciousness are so far removed from the real reality that we can discard their pronouncements out of hand. They are the loony ones, just as are those who think that UFOs do not exist or are seen only by crazies.

RR