COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS IN A PROCESS COSMOLOGY *
John H. Buchanan, Ph.D
Introduction
I am grateful for this chance to share a few thoughts on Richard M. Bucke’s classic work, Cosmic Consciousness. 1 Being asked to present a paper at this conference afforded me the welcome opportunity to undertake a careful reading of this important book. Before proceeding with my process critique of Cosmic Consciousness, let me make a few general observations.
Cosmic Consciousness must be deemed a seminal contribution in the exploration of both nonordinary experiences and the evolution of consciousness. These two areas fall within the purview of the field of study known today as transpersonal psychology. Bucke’s writings presage the work of the two greatest contemporary thinkers in the field: Stanislav Grof and Ken Wilber. Bucke’s case studies of exceptional examples of higher states of spiritual perception set the stage for Grof’s more elaborate cartography of the mind derived from his extensive work with individuals exploring the psychic depths through induced nonordinary states of consciousness. Ken Wilber’s theories regarding the history of the evolution of consciousness, the developmental stages of the individual psyche, and the higher spiritual possibilities of the human race, are all foreshadowed in Bucke’s insightful analysis.
The passing of a century, however, has revealed some limitations in Bucke’s presentation: the case study evidence he offers is highly anecdotal and often speculative, and his interpretations of this evidence sometimes appear strongly influenced by his own encounter with “illumination” (for example, his comments on other individuals’ experiences of the “subjective light”). In addition, his ideas concerning non-Western cultures or societies, and his understanding of other religious traditions, at times exhibit the naiveties of the era and the biases of his turn-of-the-century Western worldview. On the other hand, his grasp of, and openness to, other religious traditions is quite remarkable for its time, as is his psychological sophistication in general.
All in all, though, I think it is safe to say that Cosmic Consciousness was in many ways so far ahead of its time that even after one hundred years its powerful vision still commands our attention. Bucke’s intriguing notion of “cosmic consciousness” as the primary source of all religions and revolutionary spiritual insights, supported by his collection of fascinating individual accounts, continue to inspire our imagination today. And his seminal theory of the evolution of consciousness—with self-consciousness seen as a stage in human development which is slowly being superceded by a much higher and superior form of awareness—continues to offer hope for the individual spiritual seeker and for the future of humanity as well.
These powerful, novel perceptions into spiritual reality that emerge from experiences of cosmic consciousness involve a number of factors incongruent with the modern view of reality; these factors include a sense of immortality, unity with nature, and a feeling of God’s presence, love, and grace pervading all of existence. The thesis of this paper is that the metaphysics and cosmology of the field of thought known as process philosophy hold great promise for interpreting and contextualizing these spiritual insights within a coherent vision of the universe—a vision that is congruent with our everyday experience of the world and our scientific knowledge as well. Moreover, this approach can help us to comprehend how experiences of cosmic consciousness might be internally structured so as to provide a mode of access to these new spiritual dimensions and insights. Before moving into these matters, let me first say a few words to help clarify what I mean by “process philosophy.”
What is Process Thought?
As I am using the term, process philosophy refers primarily to the writings of Alfred North Whitehead and the complementary work done by Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, and David Griffin.2 Whitehead lived from 1861 to 1947 and was a mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and nature, and, towards the end of his life, conceived one of the greatest philosophical systems ever devised. Being fluent with modern science, highly cognizant of most of the history of philosophy, and armed with a revolutionary understanding of the nature of experience and reality, Whitehead was able to create an original vision of the universe that is particularly far-reaching in scope and which provides a unique interpretive context for examining the phenomenon of cosmic consciousness,
Unfortunately for this presentation (as well as for all of us who find Whitehead’s ideas so valuable), the novelty and complexity of Whitehead’s thought make it impossible to present briefly a clear and concise overview of his entire philosophical system. I will, however, try to introduce a few key notions that lie at the heart of his thought, and which are particularly relevant to my thesis. These ideas will then be expanded and clarified as we examine various aspects of cosmic consciousness from a process perspective.
A great strength of Whitehead’s approach is that he describes the universe entirely in terms of experiential elements, yet avoids the multiple pitfalls of thereby reducing nature to mere appearance, or of making all reality a thought in the mind of God or an illusory manifestation of the One. Whitehead accomplishes this feat through his novel understanding of experience. The tremendous originality of his idea is brought home by Cobb’s and Griffin’s historical appraisal: “Alone among major philosophers of East or West he finds among the components of concrescence other units of process.”3 (“Concrescence” is Whitehead’s technical term for the self-creative activity of unifying past influences into a new whole, thus constituting a new moment of experience.) The past is present within the present moment.
For Whitehead, all of reality is composed of occasions or moments of experience; William James, more colorfully, referred to these moments of synthetic, psychical activity as “drops”: “They come to us in drops. Time itself comes in drops.”4 The philosophical breakthrough here is in understanding how each moment of
experience constructs itself out of past moments of experience: elements of past occasions flow directly into the new moment of becoming and are then synthesized into a novel experiential unity. Thus the past is really present within each new drop of experience (as is the future via the moment’s anticipation of the consequences of its own activities). To imagine what this internal inclusion of the past feels like, consider the experience of having a memory of a past event, or of sensing the pain of injured nerve cells as it arises in one’s body and passes into conscious awareness. This internal inclusion involves a sense of feeling other experiences within one’s own being—inside one’s own experience—such as when we include a loved one’s feelings within our own. When we experience, we feel the feelings of other entities: be it our personal past feelings (memories), the feelings of our body (for example, hunger, sexual arousal, emotions), the feelings of another person, or the primitive feelings/energies of the world around us.
Whitehead’s analysis of an occasion of experience may sound similar to other theories, but it differs in critical ways even from those that resemble it most closely. For example, Leibniz’s monads are also atomic psychical units, but because they are enduring, rather than momentary, they have no “windows” to connect them to other entities in the world. Thus God is called upon to coordinate the infinitude of monads in such a way that the illusion of interaction and connection is maintained. The Buddhist understanding of experience, while also very close to Whitehead’s in a number of ways, differs in a critical regard. For Buddhism, the moment of experience is seen as ultimately independent from past and future moments: “In that perspective there is no past and future and hence no time. There is only happening.”5 Whitehead, on the other hand, locates relationships to the past and future within the moment’s own process of becoming.
This direct inclusion of feelings of past entities within the moment’s own synthetic activities has important consequences. For example, it provides a fundamental, experiential connection between entities that offers a coherent account of the mind-body relationship, as well as a way of understanding how the qualities of nature can have a real, independent existence yet also be constitutive of human experience. Furthermore, as God too is conceived of as a series of moments of experience, God’s feelings also flow into the inner, psychic constitution of each new moment of experience, including all human experience.6 Thus we may say that God is always within us and also transcends us: God transcends us through each of God’s new synthetic unifications of the universe, yet is immanent within us as part of the past universe that is felt by each new moment of becoming.
Before undertaking our exploration of the phenomenon of cosmic consciousness, it might be helpful for those not familiar with process thought to take a little closer look at Whitehead’s “panexperientialism.”7 Whitehead follows Descartes in arguing that the moment of experience is the preeminent starting point for metaphysical analysis. But he differs from Descartes in that he does not take conscious thought as paradigmatic of human experience, but rather includes the full range of human experience in his attempt to discover its essence. Whitehead argues that it is human experience itself that provides our only direct knowledge of, or contact with, Reality. If we can delineate the basic features of our experience, we can then generalize these essential structures to create a metaphysical description of reality at large. And, in Process and Reality, Whitehead has done precisely that.
For Whitehead, the essential movement of the universe is the many becoming one, and being increased by one. This means that every occasion of experience unifies itself synthetically out of the past array of already accomplished moments of experience, and then adds itself to the fabric of reality as a new “one,” a new achieved experience to be felt in turn by future experiences. This “panexperientialism” means that all the actualities in the universe are either occasions of experience, groupings of these occasions, or feelings within the occasions. Thus atoms, molecules, cells, and human souls are all composed of series of momentary experiences of synthesized feelings of the past. These series of experiences also tend to form social groupings, so that trees are formed out of cells and rocks are formed out of molecules, while complex societies such as the human body contain various levels of groupings of societies within themselves.
Where Whitehead differs from many panpsychists, both past and present, is that, for him, most of the experience in the universe is unconscious. Even in the case of human beings, the vast majority of our experience occurs below the threshold of conscious awareness. Looking further down the scale of complexity, molecules and cells have real experiences, but are devoid of conscious awareness—we might speculate that their experience consists of some type of extremely primitive synthetic feeling of unification and purpose. Another way that Whitehead differs from most panpsychists is that he does not attribute experience to all macroscopic entities and objects in our world. For example, even though the atoms, molecules, and cells, that compose such things as trees, rocks, and houses, are experiential in nature, he does not believe that such objects (that is, trees, rocks, and houses) in toto possess a unified center capable of experience. In other words, flowers probably do not have souls, even though their cellular components are themselves experiential. (There is, however, nothing in Whitehead metaphysics that rules out the possibility that flowers, trees, or even stars are ensouled; this question will ultimately have to be decided empirically.)
Cosmic “Illumination” in a Process Perspective
Our discussion of the vicissitudes of experience—conscious and unconscious—provides an appropriate lead-in to the central matter of this paper: cosmic consciousness. More specifically, I would like to begin by examining the major characteristics of what Bucke refers to as the state of illumination that introduces the “cosmic sense.” Early in his book, Bucke summarizes cosmic consciousness in this way:
This consciousness shows the cosmos to consist not of dead matter governed by unconscious, rigid, and unintending law; it shows it on the contrary as entirely immaterial, entirely spiritual and entirely alive; it shows that death is an absurdity, that everyone and everything has eternal life; it shows that the universe is God
and that God is the universe, and that no evil ever did or ever will enter into it; . . . . (CC 17)
In a more thorough description of cosmic consciousness, Bucke cites eleven “marks of the Cosmic Sense,” but for our purposes here I would like to focus on those factors most related to his earlier description quoted above, namely, the intellectual illumination, the sense of immortality, the loss of the fear of death, and the loss of the sense of sin (CC 79).
First, perhaps, I should clarify that the intellectual illumination of cosmic consciousness does not refer to a coming into possession of all knowledge or all wisdom. While an accelerated capacity for learning and action is concomitant with this experience (CC 76), the type of knowledge revealed through the cosmic sense is primarily intuitive in nature and involves a deeper understanding of the meaning and functioning of the universe and of God, which arises directly out of an enhanced sense of connectedness to more fundamental levels of reality.
The characteristic of cosmic consciousness that provides the most information about this state is referred to by Bucke as “intellectual illumination.” Some of the key experiential insights that arise out of the cosmic sense are: that the cosmos “is a living presence” and “an infinite ocean of life”; that “all life is eternal”; that the human soul is “immortal”; that “all things work together for the good of each and all”; that love is the “foundation principle of the world”; and that the “happiness of every individual is in the long run absolutely certain” (CC 73). This picture of the universe is strikingly similar to the one offered by process thought—which, in addition, can provide a coherent, philosophical account of how these mystical insights fit into an overall metaphysical and cosmological scheme.
In interpreting this cosmic vision of the universe as a “living presence” and an “infinite ocean of life,” a Whiteheadian might point to two related aspects of the process cosmology. First, from a process perspective, the universe is more aptly described as an infinite ocean of feeling, which is very close in intent to Bucke’s image of “an infinite ocean of life,” but allows for a distinction between living entities—those possessing a significant dimension of original mental activity—from the nonliving entities that, while experiential in nature, exist almost entirely through simple repetition of form. A cell or a soul are examples of living entities, while an atom, simple molecule, or a rock would be considered nonliving. However, in Whitehead’s philosophy this distinction does not carry the implication of there being “dead” or insentient matter in the universe. All existing actualities are composed of self-creating moments of experience, even though they may not be capable of original mental activity or true novelty. “Feeling” is the term most often used by Whitehead to describe the fundamental activity of receiving and integrating the past into a new moment of experience that characterizes every actuality. Thus we live in a universe that is an “ocean of feeling,” an infinite tide of drops of experience that are forever interflowing and essentially interrelated.
Out of these momentary drops of experience emerge the enduring objects and souls amid which we live our everyday lives. But behind and beneath the appearances of our life-world exists this flow of seething bursts of feeling, or “energy.” These drops of being are continuously interpenetrating and sharing the essence of their feelings with one another, with each having its own moment of enjoyment as it integrates all the shared feelings. These “drops” can also be thought of as pulses or vibrations of experience. When we are in a sufficiently sensitive state, the feelings from these “subtle” dimensions of reality can flow more easily into our conscious awareness, as we see in this experience of C. M. C., one of the few women that Bucke includes among his case studies: “The light and color glowed, the atmosphere seemed to quiver and vibrate around and within me. Perfect rest and peace and joy were everywhere, and, more strange than all, there came to me a sense as of some serene, magnetic presence—grand and all pervading” (CC 326).
C. M. C.’s experience of an all-pervading presence fits in with Bucke’s notion of the universe as a living presence, or that “the universe is God and that God is the universe” (CC 17). This is the second sense in which the universe can be said to be “living,” for the God of process philosophy is a “grand and serene” living presence that pervades our universe. God exists as a series of moments of experience that are in interflowing interaction with all the other momentary experiences that constellate our universe. God, however, is the one entity who is able to fully synthesize and preserve all the feelings that flow into its Being in every moment.
While process thought is in agreement with Bucke’s notion of God as a living presence pervading the universe, his total equation of God with the universe—that “the universe is God and that God is the universe”—needs to be interpreted carefully. For if God is identical with the universe, then we have the kind of panpsychism that reduces all other entities to mere modes or manifestations of God. If, on the other hand, God is defined in terms of a sheer universal principle or force—such as Love or Life—then God as a real, experiencing entity tends to be lost in the equation. One of the central insights of process philosophy is, that even though God is all-pervasive and all-preserving, God still requires a universe filled with real creatures, as they are the source of the feelings that inform God’s moment-to-moment experiences. And, even though every creature is influenced by God, each enjoys its own moment of becoming that is eminently real. Both God and the Creatures are real, and each requires the other. Thus the relationship between the universe and God is reciprocal and complex, rather than one of identity.
Particularly important to the experience of cosmic consciousness is the obtained sense or intuition of “an immense WHOLE, as dwarfs all conception, imagination or speculation” (CC 74). A part of this intuition of “wholeness” may be attributed to either a heightened sense of connectedness to all things, or to the vast, ecstatic experience of illuminative openness itself. But one key aspect of this sense of Wholeness might be more specifically defined as a profound intuition of the sacred dimension of reality which generally lies below our threshold of awareness: namely, the unity of being that is God’s experience of the universe. Here, Cobb and Griffin explore Whitehead’s belief that the beauty of the world points to the existence of an Intelligence great enough to appreciate the “larger view” of things:
When we survey nature and think however flitting and superficial has been the animal enjoyment of its wonders, and when we realize how incapable the separate cells and pulsations of each flower are of enjoying the total effect—then our sense of the value of the details for the totality dawns upon our consciousness. This is the intuition of holiness, the intuition of the sacred, which is at the foundation of all religions. (MT 119-120.)
This prereflective awareness of the unity of the world becomes an explicit awareness in process thought. God is the unified experience of all things.8
This cosmic sense of the “Whole,” that flashes before one’s consciousness during the ecstasy of illumination, arises as the previously unconscious feelings of God’s unifying presence surge into the forefront of one’s ultrasensitized awareness. It is interesting that Whitehead uses the example of nature as a mode of apprehending the existence of an ultimate unifying presence in the universe. In many of Bucke’s accounts of cosmic consciousness, nature is either an important factor in the onset of the illumination experience, or becomes a source of revelation during and subsequent to the dawning of cosmic consciousness. The central point here, however, is that, according to process thought, powerful feelings of God’s moment-to-moment experiential unification of the universe lie hidden within each of us somewhere in our unconscious depths. Process philosophy suggests that it is the emergence into conscious awareness of these feelings of a great underlying Unity that contribute to the sense of Wholeness that appears during cosmic consciousness.
Complementing this sense of a universal wholeness, perhaps, is the sense of psychic wholeness that arises when the tensions between conscious beliefs and the deeper truths about reality are resolved. That is, a deep sense of psychic integration or unification occurs when consciousness becomes more fully attuned to the universal aspects of reality that structure our unconscious experience:
to the extent that our conscious beliefs are in tension with the universal features of human experience, we are split within ourselves. We do not experience psychic wholeness, since our emotions, valuations, and purposes and consequently our behavior are informed by conflicting beliefs. For the sake of psychic wholeness and consistency of action, it is important for our conscious beliefs to correspond with the prereflective beliefs involved in our primordial experience.9
I think it is likely that this “attuning” is one aspect of the process that occurs during the illumination of cosmic consciousness.
The Nature of God
A number of the other qualities perceived in cosmic consciousness also find their parallels in process philosophy’s understanding of the nature of God. Along with being
understood as one series of experiences within the infinite ocean of feeling—albeit the supreme set of experiences—God is conceived in abstraction as having a dual nature. On the one side, God’s primordial nature consists of all pure possibilities or potentialities ordered, valued, and embedded within God’s desire for their appropriate actualization; on the other side is God’s consequent nature, the moment to moment perfecting and preserving synthesis of all accomplished universal activity. Thus God provides the inspiration for every new moment of becoming as well as a sympathetic and redeeming reception of every completed experience. (While this division of God into two natures is a helpful abstraction for understanding God’s interactions with the world, it is important to keep in mind that these two natures are in fact unified in the experiential reality of God’s wholeness of being.)
Whitehead’s conception of God’s primordial nature offers a philosophical grounding for the intuitions that “all things work together for the good” and that love is the “foundation principle of the world,” which Bucke describes as basic insights of cosmic consciousness. In Whitehead’s cosmology, each new moment of experience starts as an “open window to the totality of the past.”10 All past experiences have the potential to influence the formation of each new drop of experience, but in practice, only a small number of these past experiences have a major impact on any new occasion. However, due to God’s pervasive and moving presence throughout the universe, God’s creative love makes a significant contribution to the initial feelings of every occasion of experience, even though this love is not necessarily incorporated fully into the experience. Nevertheless, God’s influence flows directly into the origination of every new moment of becoming; this influence is referred to as God’s initial aim for the occasion. The ‘initial aim’ offers an ideal possibility for how the new occasion might unfold itself—acting as a lure that can be fully accepted, partially actualized, or completely rejected. But regardless of the occasion’s response to this ideal possibility of actualization, every new moment of experience in the universe is initially pointed towards the means of its own perfection: namely, “the maximal harmonious intensity that is possible for a creature, given its context.”11 This perfection includes its potential influence on the future, as every occasion involves anticipation as part of its basic structure. Thus an enhanced intuition of God’s action in the world would reveal that, in the unconscious depths of all experience, God is continuously urging all things towards the best that they can be in each moment, including how they can benefit others in the future. In the illumination of cosmic consciousness, these elements may well be perceived in terms of a foundational love that is moving every occasion to “work together for the good.”
This is one way that love is foundational to the world in a process cosmology. There is another way also. As we have just seen, God acts as the source of creative possibility and as a persuasive agent towards the actualization of perfection in each moment. This is God’s love as creative. God’s love is also responsive. Every moment of experience passes into God’s consequent nature, where it is sympathetically received, lovingly transformed, and preserved everlastingly. Thus God feels along with us and redeems our experience. God is the opposite of an “Unmoved Mover,” or a mere abstract principle of Love or Being. Rather, God’s love is a perfection of what we know as true human love: “love in the fullest sense involves a sympathetic response to the loved one. Sympathy means feeling the feelings of the other . . . .”12 This is the second way in which God’s love might be experienced as “foundational” to the universe—as an intimate, pervasive Presence who lovingly shares our every hope and fear, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. Thus we are loved both by God’s desire and effort to guide us to perfection in every moment of our lives, and also by God’s caring sympathy for our experiences as they are received within God’s consequent nature.
There is another dimension to God’s consequent nature which can help clarify the sense of salvation, immortality, and the transcendence of evil that characterize cosmic consciousness. For as we are lovingly received into God’s own experience, we are also “saved” in the sense of obtaining immortality within God’s own being:
The consequent nature of God is his judgement on the world. He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgement of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved. It is also the judgement of a wisdom which uses what in the temporal world is mere wreckage.
. . . The revolts of destructive evil, purely self-regarding, are dismissed into their triviality of merely individual facts; and yet the good they did achieve in individual joy, in individual sorrow, in the introduction of needed contrast, is yet saved by its relation to the completed whole. The image—and it is but an image—the image under which this operative growth of God’s nature is best conceived, is that of a tender care that nothing be lost.13
Not only are all our experiences saved and redeemed within God’s harmonious unification and caring preservation of all events, it is also possible to consciously feel God’s salvation working in every moment of our lives. The feelings of salvation and transcendence of evil that flow forth during cosmic consciousness can be understood as coming from a deep openness to God’s loving embrace and transformation of our every experience.
Evil and Immortality
Our lives have ultimate meaning because the contributions that we make to the world also “contribute everlastingly to the joy of God”14:
This divine life is neither eternal, in the sense of timeless, nor temporal, in the sense of perpetual perishing. Instead it is everlasting, constantly receiving from the world but retaining what in the world is past in the immediacy of its everlasting present. Whitehead saw that “‘everlastingness’ is the content of that vision upon which the finer religions are built—the ‘many’ absorbed everlastingly in the final unity” (PR 527).
This everlasting reality is the kingdom of heaven.15
While process philosophy believes in the real presence of evil in the world, the everlasting reality of the “kingdom of heaven” overcomes evil by providing us with final purpose and safety in God’s being.16 Unfortunately, I do not think that these elements can lend support for a literal reading of Bucke’s claim that cosmic consciousness leads to the intuitive knowledge that “the happiness of every individual is in the long run absolutely certain” (CC 72). For that matter, it does not appear even from Bucke’s biographical accounts that the lives of his case studies always, or even usually, have “happy endings.” However, if “final happiness” is understood in terms of objective immortality, and a sense of salvation in every moment, then process thought can provide a foundation for this intuition. So perhaps we should explore more closely the other characteristic intuition revealed through intellectual illumination: that “all life is eternal” and that the human soul is “immortal.”
The type of immortality that God’s “everlastingness” grants is a form of “objective immortality.” All of a person’s experiences are preserved perfectly and forever within God’s being. Thus one aspect of the intuition of immortality found in cosmic consciousness may be connected to a heightened sensitivity to this dimension of God’s redeeming love. Objective immortality, however, does not necessarily entail subjective immortality, that is, the individual soul’s survival of bodily death. And since Bucke later describes this cosmic intuition of immortality as knowing that “individual existence is continuous beyond what is called death” (CC 76), we must take seriously the question of a literal subjective immortality.17
Process philosophy is open to the possibility of the soul having ongoing adventures after the death of its physical body. This would be envisioned as a continuation of the series of occasions of experience that form the personality or soul, which, due to the intensity of its experiential unifications, is able to survive outside its special physical environment. However, there is nothing within the metaphysics of process thought that would suggest that this type of continuation is necessary, or even highly probable. Could it be that something else is being intuited in these cases which perhaps is being mistaken for the soul’s survival of physical death, something related to another sense of the “eternal?”
Bucke describes this cosmic intuition as knowing “that the life which is in man is eternal, as all life is eternal; that the soul of man is as immortal as God is . . .” (CC 73). On the one hand, this could be interpreted as congruent with Whitehead’s notion of objective immortality—but there appears also to be an additional dimension having to do with a sense of “eternity” that permeates all of reality. In Whitehead’s metaphysics, this sense of eternity is found at the heart of each moment of becoming. Each occasion of experience creates its own moment of time and space. But during the act of self-creation, that occasion is “outside” of time, in an “eternal now”: “every moment is a now, which in this sense is timeless.”18 My suggestion is that cosmic consciousness creates a greatly heightened awareness of the present moment and the influences flowing into it from the unconsciousness depths. One major intuition of this state, therefore, is of the “timelessness” of the moment—of all moments—as it exists in the “eternal now.”19 Bucke writes that this sense of immortality is “not an intellectual conviction . . . nor is it an experience such as learning something before unknown,” but is rather somehow
given as simply and directly as is one’s own sense of individuality (CC 74).
It is difficult for me to see how an intuition of one’s survival of physical death would arise as given from one’s very being, as Bucke describes it; however, a sense of eternity and immortality—as shared by all experiential entities—could arise from a powerful perception of the “eternal now” belonging to every moment, combined with a deep feeling of the reality of God’s redemptive love that absorbs and saves all experiences. One might also imagine how one’s “fear of death” and “sense of sin” might also vanish in the epiphany of the eternal now suffused with God’s loving inspiration and sympathetic preservation.
The Process and Structure of Cosmic Consciousnes
Up to this point, we have looked at a number of the “traits” of cosmic consciousness, but have said relatively little about how this new faculty may come into being. While Bucke focuses primarily on what is revealed through this cosmic sense, near the end of the book, Bucke shares his view on the question of how self-consciousness passes into cosmic consciousness: “So (it seems) are concepts, emotions, sense perceptions, all the spiritual elements of the thinking, feeling, knowing man, individually and collectively builded up until the walls, buttresses, pinnacles and towers of a still higher consciousness are finished. The moment of completion comes, the signal is given, the scaffolding falls and instantly the new structure stands revealed” (CC 381). Basically, Bucke is hypothesizing that a new structuring of the conscious and unconscious mind produces the shift from our normal awareness into the state of cosmic consciousness. If that were true, however, then the attained illumination should become a permanent faculty, or at least one easily accessed and employed. This does not seem to be the case: “In many cases it appears only once, and for a few moments only, but that flash is sufficient to light up (more or less brightly) all the subsequent years of life. In the greatest cases it may be present for many minutes at a time and return at intervals of weeks, months or years” (CC 236-37). Plotinus, one of the great mystics of the ancient world, may have had but eight episodes of illumination (CC 123). In addition, there is an enormous variation in the range and depth of illumination that transpires in different individuals (CC 66-67), and the heightening of faculties that occurs is limited to certain abilities or regions of experience. For example, while the aesthetic sense and religious sensitivities seem to be vastly enhanced in most individuals who receive illumination, learned skills, such as writing, do not receive the same type of enhancement (CC 375).
What I am getting at here is, to think of cosmic consciousness as a movement into a new and complete structure of consciousness both exaggerates the finality of this shift in awareness and misses the possibility that the experience of illumination itself may be a primary cause of the changes in consciousness, rather than the result of a shift in mind structures. Modern consciousness research has demonstrated that mystical experiences, indistinguishable from those cited by Bucke, can be induced in a number of ways including psychedelic substances, sensory deprivation, and special psychophysical techniques.20 In these cases of induced nonordinary states, it seems
almost certain that the observed shifts in consciousness are the result of the techniques involved, or at least are initiated by said methods. Although Bucke recognizes the possibility of inducing experiences of cosmic consciousness, he appears somewhat dubious about both the efficacy of such techniques and the significance of the results of these methods (CC 359-61). I believe that the experience of illumination that delivers one into the reality of cosmic consciousness can be initiated by a wide variety of situations and methods, but that Bucke is correct in his contention that the experience tends to be more powerful and of more long-lasting significance when it appears spontaneously in the life of spirituality-grounded individuals.
But from my process perspective, regardless of whether the experience of illumination is induced or appears on the scene spontaneously, the critical causative factor producing illumination is a sudden rush of primitive feeling from the depths of unconscious experience. This flood of feeling does two things: first, it breaks down old patterns of meaning and the ego defense structures that usually canalize experience into safe and familiar paths of conscious awareness; second, these primitive feelings, which are usually muted or lost through habitual modes of unconscious processing, suddenly break through into full awareness conveying perceptions of dimensions of experience usually hidden from view. This breakdown in the normal structures of experience frees the new occasion to organize the flood of primitive feelings in such a way as to maximize—rather than obstruct—conscious awareness of these deeper levels and meanings. These primitive feelings carry direct and powerful intuitions of the sacred dimensions of reality, of the deeper nature of the self, and of the spirituality suffusing the universe around us.
Cosmic consciousness results from this breakdown of habitual experiential patterns accompanied by a concomitant flooding of consciousness with perceptions and intuitions of a reality never before directly realized—a reality lying below the threshold of self-conscious awareness and only glimpsed from time to time.
The “instantaneousness of the illumination” (CC 75) can be understood to be related to the sudden flooding of awareness with a new range of feelings and the simultaneous reorganizing of the structures of the depth unconscious to accommodate and, more importantly, incorporate and highlight these perceptions. (If the individual is not able to form novel and effective patterns of feeling capable of integrating these powerful unconscious perceptions, there is then a possibility of mental breakdown versus cosmic illumination. This may be why Bucke places such heavy emphasis on the physical and spiritual health displayed by his case studies of cosmic consciousness.) I think that Bucke is correct that in some cases a slight shift in awareness is all that is required to open these floodgates of change, but in other cases, I believe, it is this tidal flow of feelings that instigates the sudden onset of illumination.
The Cosmic Sense of Subjective Light and Ecstasy
Two other aspects of illumination that Bucke emphasizes are the “subjective light” and the “moral elevation” that accompany this state. His hypothesis to the cause of this “light” warrants repeating: “It seems tolerably certain that with illumination there
occurs actual, physical, molecular rearrangement somewhere in the cerebral centers and it is this molecular rearrangement which, when considerable and sudden, gives rise to the phenomenon of the subjective light” (CC 345). I am not convinced of the necessity of hypothesizing significant molecular rearrangement, but I do think that this flood of feeling through the neural networks may actually stimulate the brain/mind system in such a way as to produce an analogue to physical light. However, we should also consider the possibility that this flood of primitive intuitions of spiritual entities and realities may itself convey a form of “light” that reflects the actual inner nature of these entities themselves, and which may thus be represented in our conscious awareness as some type of manifestation of “light.” (A careful examination of Bucke’s case studies will reveal that the quality of the “subjective light” varies tremendously between subjects—where it is found at all—and is a more diverse phenomenon than Bucke seems to realize.21)
The final element in illumination to be dealt with here is “moral elevation”: “At that same instant he is, as it were, bathed in an emotion of joy, assurance, triumph, ‘salvation’” (CC 73); in other words, ecstasy. One part of this experience of emotional elevation can be related directly to the flood of feeling entering into awareness due to the heightened state of openness that has arisen during illumination. Another source of the emotions of joy and triumph and the like can be attributed to the release that comes from the breakdown in ego structures and the associated sense of being connected to something larger. However, a flood of feeling can also be terrifying or painful, as can the loss of ego boundaries, so again we must address what kind of feelings and perceptions are filling awareness in the illumination experience. Here, process philosophy would suggest that feelings of God and other aspects of the spiritual dimension are guiding and contributing to this flow of feeling from the unconscious depths, so that the conscious, subjective feeling becomes one of “moral elevation,” as described by Bucke.
A final factor in this sense of “ecstasy” is the occasion of experience’s perception of its own essence, which, according to process metaphysics, is enjoyment: “In Whitehead’s words, experience is the ‘self-enjoyment of being one among many, and of being one arising out of the composition of many.’ (PR 220.) In this sense, every individual unit of process enjoys its own existence.”22 Besides being more open to other spiritual entities and the depths of nature and the cosmos, the experience of illumination also provides a heightened awareness of one’s own experiential depths. And the basic fact of our own experience is that it is a one arising out of many—that we are in each moment the active unification of the entire universe. The feeling that accompanies this deep realization of who we really are, is ‘enjoyment,’ or perhaps, when felt intensely, even ecstasy.23
Caution about Bucke’s Vision for the Future of Cosmic Consciousness
Let me conclude these ruminations with a consideration of Bucke’s vision that cosmic consciousness represents the future spiritual development of humankind; that it will eventually become an innate faculty that will transform the very definition of what it means to be human:
so will Cosmic Consciousness become more and more universal and appear earlier in the individual life until the race at large will possess this faculty. The same race and not the same; for a Cosmic Conscious race will not be the same race which exists today, any more than the present race of men is the same race which existed prior to the evolution of self-consciousness. . . . This new race is in act of being born from us, and in the near future it will occupy and possess the earth. (CC 383-84)
Bucke also speculates on the possibility of divergent evolution of consciousness, so that some of the population might exhibit various parapsychological powers, while others possess cosmic consciousness (CC 372). In addition, he recognizes the possibility of states of consciousness that are higher than cosmic consciousness, and that humanity may eventually scale these heights (CC 213).
For Bucke, this vision of a future humanity manifesting cosmic consciousness implies a much more deeply and authentically religious world, one in which all of life is governed by a lived spirituality. The old religions will be “melted down,” as religious authority gives way to direct experiential knowledge of sacred realities (CC 5). While process philosophy, and theology, finds great value in Bucke’s vision of our spiritual future, a few of his assumptions bear closer scrutiny, if we are to avoid certain pitfalls.
For example, at the close of Cosmic Consciousness, Bucke seeks to explain “the mystery of religion” (CC 381-82). In short, Bucke argues that the true sources of religion lie in the experiences and insights coming out of cosmic consciousness, but that these insights (for several reasons) have not been clearly understood—or badly misunderstood—by the rest of the world living in the state of everyday self-consciousness. However, when seen for what they really are, an essential unity is perceived in the teachings of all great religious visionaries: “A critical study of all these (seemingly) diverse accounts will show they are all more or less unsuccessful attempts to describe the same thing . . .” (CC 382). But is this true? Are all religions really getting at the same thing, at least in the heart of their mystical insights?
Speaking more definitively, Bucke argues that the faculty of cosmic consciousness “has many names,” including: Nirvana in Buddhism; Christ’s “Kingdom of Heaven”; Paul’s “Christ” or “the Spirit of God”; and “Gabriel” for Mohammed (CC 62). But it is one thing to suggest that all these religious visionaries possessed at times a heightened perception into the depths of the cosmos, and quite another to claim that there is an essential unity to what they brought back from their mystical experiences. Cobb and Griffin argue convincingly that although there are important similarities between Christian and Buddhist structures of existence, there are also real differences. Although it is hoped that these differences represent learning opportunities for both traditions, process philosophy does not understand the experience of Nirvana to be identical with what we might call “Christ Consciousness.” The former is interpreted in terms of an essential openness to the past so that each moment conforms itself perfectly and without bias to “things as they are”:
The ideal for the Buddhist is the nothingness of perfect emptiness. In Whiteheadian terms the individual actual occasion is to realize itself as a void that interposes nothing to the many that would constitute it as one. Practically, this means that the occasion voids itself of self-definition and delimiting aim so as to allow what-is to fill it. The aim is to achieve an optimal fullness by interposing no principle of selection.24
In contrast, Christ Consciousness, from a process perspective, involves a perfect alignment between God’s initial aim and the past purposes of the individual so that one’s very subjectivity is defined by its attunement to God’s creative impulse.25 Extrapolating from this process account of two major types of religious consciousness, it appears that Bucke may be conflating a general mystical state, which he refers to as “cosmic consciousness,” with a much wider range of insights into the depths of reality that may generate at least several authentic religious responses and corresponding structures of consciousness.
The future religious unity that Bucke hypothesizes as a result of cosmic consciousness may be more problematic than he would have guessed: owing in the first place to the variety of possible mystical insights and responses that our complex universe allows, but also due to the great variations in depth and intensity in the experience of cosmic consciousness itself (CC 66-67). For just as self-conscious humanity today is largely incapable of grasping the insights of those possessing the cosmic sense, so too will the insights of the greatest cosmically conscious mystics outstrip the imagination of the generally enlightened population of Bucke’s future world. Nonetheless, these gifted individuals will continue to guide humanity towards new spiritual adventure (provided that we can achieve the necessary spiritual advances to survive the environmental crises of our time), just as they have done throughout history—by helping attune the rest of humanity to the hidden depths of the universe:
The ability to perceive the previously unformulated factors in experience is extremely rare. As Whitehead says, we are not all on the same level in this regard. (RM 121.) The point is that, once someone has perceived them consciously and expressed them verbally, they can then be recognized by others. Whitehead uses the analogy of the tuning fork and the piano. The note on the tuning fork elicits a response from the piano, but only because the piano has a string tuned to the same note (RM 128.).26
Final Words
Bucke’s remarkable book, Cosmic Consciousness, examines individuals who have had powerful experiential openings into the hidden realms containing these still largely “unformulated factors in experience.” Since he wrote this book, the topic of
higher states of consciousness has flourished in the West. While a few of his ideas may have proven to be false leads, the overall thrust of his writing remains as vital today as it was one hundred years ago. One of the principal motivations in my studies has been to find a system of ideas capable of interpreting and contextualizing the kind of experiences and insights found in Bucke’s accounts. Process philosophy has proven to be by far the most useful system that I have discovered for these purpose. I hope I have been able to impart at least a glimpse of how this is so.
NOTES
1 Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., Arkana Books, [1901] 1991). All future citations from Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness will be noted parenthetically by the abbreviation “CC” followed by the appropriate page number.
2 Most of the references in this paper are from Cobb’s and Griffin’s book, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition, which I read carefully in preparation for this essay. Anyone interested in pursuing in more depth the ideas presented here should be able to do so simply by studying Process Theology and comparing it with material from Cosmic Consciousness.
3 John B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976), 139.
4 William James, A Pluralistic Universe, in Frederick Burkhardt and Fredson Bowers, eds., The Works of William James (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 104.
5 Cobb and Griffin, 138.
6 I am employing the changes to Whitehead’s theory of God made by Charles Hartshorne, which are generally accepted by the contemporary community of process thinkers. In Process and Reality, Whitehead describes God as a never-ending process of synthetic unification, which violates his own dictum that God should be the final exemplar of metaphysical principles, not invoked as an exception (see, for example, 343). Thus Hartshorne has suggested that God be conceived as a series of moments of experience, as are all other enduring entities in Whitehead’s metaphysics. The rest of Whitehead’s theories of God are congruent with this interpretation, and are in fact generally more intelligible within the context of Hartshorne’s revision.
7 I prefer to use Griffin’s term, “panexperientialism,” which suggests process philosophy’s view of the universe as completely composed of experiential actualities, while being less obscure than Hartshorne’s term “panentheism,” and avoiding the overly-psychological connotations of “panpsychism.” Panexperientialism points to a less anthropocentric understanding of the essential features of human experience and how these elements can be generalized to describe the basic activity of all entities in the universe. 8 Cobb and Griffin, 151. In this quotation’s parenthetical citation, MT refers to: Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (The Macmillan Company, 1938).
9 Cobb and Griffin, 34.
10 Cobb and Griffin, 20.
11 Cobb and Griffin, 71.
12 Cobb and Griffin, 44.
13 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected edition: David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, eds. (Macmillan Publishing Co.; New York: Free Press paperback edition, [1929] 1979), 346.
14 Cobb and Griffin, 123.
15 Cobb and Griffin, 122. In this quotation’s parenthetical citation, PR refers to: Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (The Macmillan Company, 1929).
16 Cobb and Griffin, 127.
17 Interestingly enough, the one case that Bucke describes as an anomaly, because of its unique perspective on immortality, is actually the closest to Whitehead’s doctrine of “everlastingness” and Hartshorne’s own perspective on personal survival: “He believes, is indeed sure, that after death he will be absorbed into God, and that in losing his individuality he will gain something much more valuable. His feeling, his conviction, his knowledge (as in all these cases) is that the best will happen” (CC 299-300).
18 Cobb and Griffin, 16.
19 It is instructive to note the following quotation, that Bucke cites from Spinosa, which bears directly on this issue of “eternity” as something beyond time: “In all exact knowledge the mind knows itself under the form of eternity; that is to say, in every such act it is eternal and knows itself as eternal. This eternity is not a persistence in time after the dissolution of the body, no more than a pre-existence in time, for it is not commensurable with time at all” (CC 279).
20 For a thorough discussion of the meaning and production of nonordinary states of consciousness, see any number of Stanislav Grof’s books, but especially Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death and Transcendence in Psychotherapy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985) and The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).
21 It may be worth noting that, in regard to Bucke’s characterization of the subjective light as a “sense of being immersed in a flame, or rose-colored cloud” (CC 72), Barbara Ann Brennan locates a “rose energy” in the heart chakra, and writes that “couples in love create a beautiful rose cloud of energy around them” (Light Emerging: The Journey of Personal Healing [New York: Bantam Books, 1993], 180). Thus the experience of a rose-colored light during illumination may be related to an intense activation of the heart chakra.22 Cobb and Griffin, 17.
23 The reader may wish to compare this Whiteheadian notion of intensified “enjoyment” with Bucke’s own ideas concerning the heightened enjoyment that occurs as the level of awareness increases from the simple consciousness found in animals, to the self-conscious state characteristic of contemporary human beings, to the bliss and joy of cosmic consciousness (see especially CC 76-77).
24 Cobb and Griffin, 141. 25 Cobb and Griffin, 105. 26 Cobb and Griffin, 36-37. In this quotation’s parenthetical citation, RM refers to: Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (The Macmillan Company, 1926).
* Presented at the June 30, 2001 SSMR session in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the publication of R. M. Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness, held in conjunction with the INTA Congress, at Harrah’s Hotel in Las Vegas, NV.
I am grateful for this chance to share a few thoughts on Richard M. Bucke’s classic work, Cosmic Consciousness. 1 Being asked to present a paper at this conference afforded me the welcome opportunity to undertake a careful reading of this important book. Before proceeding with my process critique of Cosmic Consciousness, let me make a few general observations.
Cosmic Consciousness must be deemed a seminal contribution in the exploration of both nonordinary experiences and the evolution of consciousness. These two areas fall within the purview of the field of study known today as transpersonal psychology. Bucke’s writings presage the work of the two greatest contemporary thinkers in the field: Stanislav Grof and Ken Wilber. Bucke’s case studies of exceptional examples of higher states of spiritual perception set the stage for Grof’s more elaborate cartography of the mind derived from his extensive work with individuals exploring the psychic depths through induced nonordinary states of consciousness. Ken Wilber’s theories regarding the history of the evolution of consciousness, the developmental stages of the individual psyche, and the higher spiritual possibilities of the human race, are all foreshadowed in Bucke’s insightful analysis.
The passing of a century, however, has revealed some limitations in Bucke’s presentation: the case study evidence he offers is highly anecdotal and often speculative, and his interpretations of this evidence sometimes appear strongly influenced by his own encounter with “illumination” (for example, his comments on other individuals’ experiences of the “subjective light”). In addition, his ideas concerning non-Western cultures or societies, and his understanding of other religious traditions, at times exhibit the naiveties of the era and the biases of his turn-of-the-century Western worldview. On the other hand, his grasp of, and openness to, other religious traditions is quite remarkable for its time, as is his psychological sophistication in general.
All in all, though, I think it is safe to say that Cosmic Consciousness was in many ways so far ahead of its time that even after one hundred years its powerful vision still commands our attention. Bucke’s intriguing notion of “cosmic consciousness” as the primary source of all religions and revolutionary spiritual insights, supported by his collection of fascinating individual accounts, continue to inspire our imagination today. And his seminal theory of the evolution of consciousness—with self-consciousness seen as a stage in human development which is slowly being superceded by a much higher and superior form of awareness—continues to offer hope for the individual spiritual seeker and for the future of humanity as well.
These powerful, novel perceptions into spiritual reality that emerge from experiences of cosmic consciousness involve a number of factors incongruent with the modern view of reality; these factors include a sense of immortality, unity with nature, and a feeling of God’s presence, love, and grace pervading all of existence. The thesis of this paper is that the metaphysics and cosmology of the field of thought known as process philosophy hold great promise for interpreting and contextualizing these spiritual insights within a coherent vision of the universe—a vision that is congruent with our everyday experience of the world and our scientific knowledge as well. Moreover, this approach can help us to comprehend how experiences of cosmic consciousness might be internally structured so as to provide a mode of access to these new spiritual dimensions and insights. Before moving into these matters, let me first say a few words to help clarify what I mean by “process philosophy.”
What is Process Thought?
As I am using the term, process philosophy refers primarily to the writings of Alfred North Whitehead and the complementary work done by Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, and David Griffin.2 Whitehead lived from 1861 to 1947 and was a mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and nature, and, towards the end of his life, conceived one of the greatest philosophical systems ever devised. Being fluent with modern science, highly cognizant of most of the history of philosophy, and armed with a revolutionary understanding of the nature of experience and reality, Whitehead was able to create an original vision of the universe that is particularly far-reaching in scope and which provides a unique interpretive context for examining the phenomenon of cosmic consciousness,
Unfortunately for this presentation (as well as for all of us who find Whitehead’s ideas so valuable), the novelty and complexity of Whitehead’s thought make it impossible to present briefly a clear and concise overview of his entire philosophical system. I will, however, try to introduce a few key notions that lie at the heart of his thought, and which are particularly relevant to my thesis. These ideas will then be expanded and clarified as we examine various aspects of cosmic consciousness from a process perspective.
A great strength of Whitehead’s approach is that he describes the universe entirely in terms of experiential elements, yet avoids the multiple pitfalls of thereby reducing nature to mere appearance, or of making all reality a thought in the mind of God or an illusory manifestation of the One. Whitehead accomplishes this feat through his novel understanding of experience. The tremendous originality of his idea is brought home by Cobb’s and Griffin’s historical appraisal: “Alone among major philosophers of East or West he finds among the components of concrescence other units of process.”3 (“Concrescence” is Whitehead’s technical term for the self-creative activity of unifying past influences into a new whole, thus constituting a new moment of experience.) The past is present within the present moment.
For Whitehead, all of reality is composed of occasions or moments of experience; William James, more colorfully, referred to these moments of synthetic, psychical activity as “drops”: “They come to us in drops. Time itself comes in drops.”4 The philosophical breakthrough here is in understanding how each moment of
experience constructs itself out of past moments of experience: elements of past occasions flow directly into the new moment of becoming and are then synthesized into a novel experiential unity. Thus the past is really present within each new drop of experience (as is the future via the moment’s anticipation of the consequences of its own activities). To imagine what this internal inclusion of the past feels like, consider the experience of having a memory of a past event, or of sensing the pain of injured nerve cells as it arises in one’s body and passes into conscious awareness. This internal inclusion involves a sense of feeling other experiences within one’s own being—inside one’s own experience—such as when we include a loved one’s feelings within our own. When we experience, we feel the feelings of other entities: be it our personal past feelings (memories), the feelings of our body (for example, hunger, sexual arousal, emotions), the feelings of another person, or the primitive feelings/energies of the world around us.
Whitehead’s analysis of an occasion of experience may sound similar to other theories, but it differs in critical ways even from those that resemble it most closely. For example, Leibniz’s monads are also atomic psychical units, but because they are enduring, rather than momentary, they have no “windows” to connect them to other entities in the world. Thus God is called upon to coordinate the infinitude of monads in such a way that the illusion of interaction and connection is maintained. The Buddhist understanding of experience, while also very close to Whitehead’s in a number of ways, differs in a critical regard. For Buddhism, the moment of experience is seen as ultimately independent from past and future moments: “In that perspective there is no past and future and hence no time. There is only happening.”5 Whitehead, on the other hand, locates relationships to the past and future within the moment’s own process of becoming.
This direct inclusion of feelings of past entities within the moment’s own synthetic activities has important consequences. For example, it provides a fundamental, experiential connection between entities that offers a coherent account of the mind-body relationship, as well as a way of understanding how the qualities of nature can have a real, independent existence yet also be constitutive of human experience. Furthermore, as God too is conceived of as a series of moments of experience, God’s feelings also flow into the inner, psychic constitution of each new moment of experience, including all human experience.6 Thus we may say that God is always within us and also transcends us: God transcends us through each of God’s new synthetic unifications of the universe, yet is immanent within us as part of the past universe that is felt by each new moment of becoming.
Before undertaking our exploration of the phenomenon of cosmic consciousness, it might be helpful for those not familiar with process thought to take a little closer look at Whitehead’s “panexperientialism.”7 Whitehead follows Descartes in arguing that the moment of experience is the preeminent starting point for metaphysical analysis. But he differs from Descartes in that he does not take conscious thought as paradigmatic of human experience, but rather includes the full range of human experience in his attempt to discover its essence. Whitehead argues that it is human experience itself that provides our only direct knowledge of, or contact with, Reality. If we can delineate the basic features of our experience, we can then generalize these essential structures to create a metaphysical description of reality at large. And, in Process and Reality, Whitehead has done precisely that.
For Whitehead, the essential movement of the universe is the many becoming one, and being increased by one. This means that every occasion of experience unifies itself synthetically out of the past array of already accomplished moments of experience, and then adds itself to the fabric of reality as a new “one,” a new achieved experience to be felt in turn by future experiences. This “panexperientialism” means that all the actualities in the universe are either occasions of experience, groupings of these occasions, or feelings within the occasions. Thus atoms, molecules, cells, and human souls are all composed of series of momentary experiences of synthesized feelings of the past. These series of experiences also tend to form social groupings, so that trees are formed out of cells and rocks are formed out of molecules, while complex societies such as the human body contain various levels of groupings of societies within themselves.
Where Whitehead differs from many panpsychists, both past and present, is that, for him, most of the experience in the universe is unconscious. Even in the case of human beings, the vast majority of our experience occurs below the threshold of conscious awareness. Looking further down the scale of complexity, molecules and cells have real experiences, but are devoid of conscious awareness—we might speculate that their experience consists of some type of extremely primitive synthetic feeling of unification and purpose. Another way that Whitehead differs from most panpsychists is that he does not attribute experience to all macroscopic entities and objects in our world. For example, even though the atoms, molecules, and cells, that compose such things as trees, rocks, and houses, are experiential in nature, he does not believe that such objects (that is, trees, rocks, and houses) in toto possess a unified center capable of experience. In other words, flowers probably do not have souls, even though their cellular components are themselves experiential. (There is, however, nothing in Whitehead metaphysics that rules out the possibility that flowers, trees, or even stars are ensouled; this question will ultimately have to be decided empirically.)
Cosmic “Illumination” in a Process Perspective
Our discussion of the vicissitudes of experience—conscious and unconscious—provides an appropriate lead-in to the central matter of this paper: cosmic consciousness. More specifically, I would like to begin by examining the major characteristics of what Bucke refers to as the state of illumination that introduces the “cosmic sense.” Early in his book, Bucke summarizes cosmic consciousness in this way:
This consciousness shows the cosmos to consist not of dead matter governed by unconscious, rigid, and unintending law; it shows it on the contrary as entirely immaterial, entirely spiritual and entirely alive; it shows that death is an absurdity, that everyone and everything has eternal life; it shows that the universe is God
and that God is the universe, and that no evil ever did or ever will enter into it; . . . . (CC 17)
In a more thorough description of cosmic consciousness, Bucke cites eleven “marks of the Cosmic Sense,” but for our purposes here I would like to focus on those factors most related to his earlier description quoted above, namely, the intellectual illumination, the sense of immortality, the loss of the fear of death, and the loss of the sense of sin (CC 79).
First, perhaps, I should clarify that the intellectual illumination of cosmic consciousness does not refer to a coming into possession of all knowledge or all wisdom. While an accelerated capacity for learning and action is concomitant with this experience (CC 76), the type of knowledge revealed through the cosmic sense is primarily intuitive in nature and involves a deeper understanding of the meaning and functioning of the universe and of God, which arises directly out of an enhanced sense of connectedness to more fundamental levels of reality.
The characteristic of cosmic consciousness that provides the most information about this state is referred to by Bucke as “intellectual illumination.” Some of the key experiential insights that arise out of the cosmic sense are: that the cosmos “is a living presence” and “an infinite ocean of life”; that “all life is eternal”; that the human soul is “immortal”; that “all things work together for the good of each and all”; that love is the “foundation principle of the world”; and that the “happiness of every individual is in the long run absolutely certain” (CC 73). This picture of the universe is strikingly similar to the one offered by process thought—which, in addition, can provide a coherent, philosophical account of how these mystical insights fit into an overall metaphysical and cosmological scheme.
In interpreting this cosmic vision of the universe as a “living presence” and an “infinite ocean of life,” a Whiteheadian might point to two related aspects of the process cosmology. First, from a process perspective, the universe is more aptly described as an infinite ocean of feeling, which is very close in intent to Bucke’s image of “an infinite ocean of life,” but allows for a distinction between living entities—those possessing a significant dimension of original mental activity—from the nonliving entities that, while experiential in nature, exist almost entirely through simple repetition of form. A cell or a soul are examples of living entities, while an atom, simple molecule, or a rock would be considered nonliving. However, in Whitehead’s philosophy this distinction does not carry the implication of there being “dead” or insentient matter in the universe. All existing actualities are composed of self-creating moments of experience, even though they may not be capable of original mental activity or true novelty. “Feeling” is the term most often used by Whitehead to describe the fundamental activity of receiving and integrating the past into a new moment of experience that characterizes every actuality. Thus we live in a universe that is an “ocean of feeling,” an infinite tide of drops of experience that are forever interflowing and essentially interrelated.
Out of these momentary drops of experience emerge the enduring objects and souls amid which we live our everyday lives. But behind and beneath the appearances of our life-world exists this flow of seething bursts of feeling, or “energy.” These drops of being are continuously interpenetrating and sharing the essence of their feelings with one another, with each having its own moment of enjoyment as it integrates all the shared feelings. These “drops” can also be thought of as pulses or vibrations of experience. When we are in a sufficiently sensitive state, the feelings from these “subtle” dimensions of reality can flow more easily into our conscious awareness, as we see in this experience of C. M. C., one of the few women that Bucke includes among his case studies: “The light and color glowed, the atmosphere seemed to quiver and vibrate around and within me. Perfect rest and peace and joy were everywhere, and, more strange than all, there came to me a sense as of some serene, magnetic presence—grand and all pervading” (CC 326).
C. M. C.’s experience of an all-pervading presence fits in with Bucke’s notion of the universe as a living presence, or that “the universe is God and that God is the universe” (CC 17). This is the second sense in which the universe can be said to be “living,” for the God of process philosophy is a “grand and serene” living presence that pervades our universe. God exists as a series of moments of experience that are in interflowing interaction with all the other momentary experiences that constellate our universe. God, however, is the one entity who is able to fully synthesize and preserve all the feelings that flow into its Being in every moment.
While process thought is in agreement with Bucke’s notion of God as a living presence pervading the universe, his total equation of God with the universe—that “the universe is God and that God is the universe”—needs to be interpreted carefully. For if God is identical with the universe, then we have the kind of panpsychism that reduces all other entities to mere modes or manifestations of God. If, on the other hand, God is defined in terms of a sheer universal principle or force—such as Love or Life—then God as a real, experiencing entity tends to be lost in the equation. One of the central insights of process philosophy is, that even though God is all-pervasive and all-preserving, God still requires a universe filled with real creatures, as they are the source of the feelings that inform God’s moment-to-moment experiences. And, even though every creature is influenced by God, each enjoys its own moment of becoming that is eminently real. Both God and the Creatures are real, and each requires the other. Thus the relationship between the universe and God is reciprocal and complex, rather than one of identity.
Particularly important to the experience of cosmic consciousness is the obtained sense or intuition of “an immense WHOLE, as dwarfs all conception, imagination or speculation” (CC 74). A part of this intuition of “wholeness” may be attributed to either a heightened sense of connectedness to all things, or to the vast, ecstatic experience of illuminative openness itself. But one key aspect of this sense of Wholeness might be more specifically defined as a profound intuition of the sacred dimension of reality which generally lies below our threshold of awareness: namely, the unity of being that is God’s experience of the universe. Here, Cobb and Griffin explore Whitehead’s belief that the beauty of the world points to the existence of an Intelligence great enough to appreciate the “larger view” of things:
When we survey nature and think however flitting and superficial has been the animal enjoyment of its wonders, and when we realize how incapable the separate cells and pulsations of each flower are of enjoying the total effect—then our sense of the value of the details for the totality dawns upon our consciousness. This is the intuition of holiness, the intuition of the sacred, which is at the foundation of all religions. (MT 119-120.)
This prereflective awareness of the unity of the world becomes an explicit awareness in process thought. God is the unified experience of all things.8
This cosmic sense of the “Whole,” that flashes before one’s consciousness during the ecstasy of illumination, arises as the previously unconscious feelings of God’s unifying presence surge into the forefront of one’s ultrasensitized awareness. It is interesting that Whitehead uses the example of nature as a mode of apprehending the existence of an ultimate unifying presence in the universe. In many of Bucke’s accounts of cosmic consciousness, nature is either an important factor in the onset of the illumination experience, or becomes a source of revelation during and subsequent to the dawning of cosmic consciousness. The central point here, however, is that, according to process thought, powerful feelings of God’s moment-to-moment experiential unification of the universe lie hidden within each of us somewhere in our unconscious depths. Process philosophy suggests that it is the emergence into conscious awareness of these feelings of a great underlying Unity that contribute to the sense of Wholeness that appears during cosmic consciousness.
Complementing this sense of a universal wholeness, perhaps, is the sense of psychic wholeness that arises when the tensions between conscious beliefs and the deeper truths about reality are resolved. That is, a deep sense of psychic integration or unification occurs when consciousness becomes more fully attuned to the universal aspects of reality that structure our unconscious experience:
to the extent that our conscious beliefs are in tension with the universal features of human experience, we are split within ourselves. We do not experience psychic wholeness, since our emotions, valuations, and purposes and consequently our behavior are informed by conflicting beliefs. For the sake of psychic wholeness and consistency of action, it is important for our conscious beliefs to correspond with the prereflective beliefs involved in our primordial experience.9
I think it is likely that this “attuning” is one aspect of the process that occurs during the illumination of cosmic consciousness.
The Nature of God
A number of the other qualities perceived in cosmic consciousness also find their parallels in process philosophy’s understanding of the nature of God. Along with being
understood as one series of experiences within the infinite ocean of feeling—albeit the supreme set of experiences—God is conceived in abstraction as having a dual nature. On the one side, God’s primordial nature consists of all pure possibilities or potentialities ordered, valued, and embedded within God’s desire for their appropriate actualization; on the other side is God’s consequent nature, the moment to moment perfecting and preserving synthesis of all accomplished universal activity. Thus God provides the inspiration for every new moment of becoming as well as a sympathetic and redeeming reception of every completed experience. (While this division of God into two natures is a helpful abstraction for understanding God’s interactions with the world, it is important to keep in mind that these two natures are in fact unified in the experiential reality of God’s wholeness of being.)
Whitehead’s conception of God’s primordial nature offers a philosophical grounding for the intuitions that “all things work together for the good” and that love is the “foundation principle of the world,” which Bucke describes as basic insights of cosmic consciousness. In Whitehead’s cosmology, each new moment of experience starts as an “open window to the totality of the past.”10 All past experiences have the potential to influence the formation of each new drop of experience, but in practice, only a small number of these past experiences have a major impact on any new occasion. However, due to God’s pervasive and moving presence throughout the universe, God’s creative love makes a significant contribution to the initial feelings of every occasion of experience, even though this love is not necessarily incorporated fully into the experience. Nevertheless, God’s influence flows directly into the origination of every new moment of becoming; this influence is referred to as God’s initial aim for the occasion. The ‘initial aim’ offers an ideal possibility for how the new occasion might unfold itself—acting as a lure that can be fully accepted, partially actualized, or completely rejected. But regardless of the occasion’s response to this ideal possibility of actualization, every new moment of experience in the universe is initially pointed towards the means of its own perfection: namely, “the maximal harmonious intensity that is possible for a creature, given its context.”11 This perfection includes its potential influence on the future, as every occasion involves anticipation as part of its basic structure. Thus an enhanced intuition of God’s action in the world would reveal that, in the unconscious depths of all experience, God is continuously urging all things towards the best that they can be in each moment, including how they can benefit others in the future. In the illumination of cosmic consciousness, these elements may well be perceived in terms of a foundational love that is moving every occasion to “work together for the good.”
This is one way that love is foundational to the world in a process cosmology. There is another way also. As we have just seen, God acts as the source of creative possibility and as a persuasive agent towards the actualization of perfection in each moment. This is God’s love as creative. God’s love is also responsive. Every moment of experience passes into God’s consequent nature, where it is sympathetically received, lovingly transformed, and preserved everlastingly. Thus God feels along with us and redeems our experience. God is the opposite of an “Unmoved Mover,” or a mere abstract principle of Love or Being. Rather, God’s love is a perfection of what we know as true human love: “love in the fullest sense involves a sympathetic response to the loved one. Sympathy means feeling the feelings of the other . . . .”12 This is the second way in which God’s love might be experienced as “foundational” to the universe—as an intimate, pervasive Presence who lovingly shares our every hope and fear, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. Thus we are loved both by God’s desire and effort to guide us to perfection in every moment of our lives, and also by God’s caring sympathy for our experiences as they are received within God’s consequent nature.
There is another dimension to God’s consequent nature which can help clarify the sense of salvation, immortality, and the transcendence of evil that characterize cosmic consciousness. For as we are lovingly received into God’s own experience, we are also “saved” in the sense of obtaining immortality within God’s own being:
The consequent nature of God is his judgement on the world. He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgement of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved. It is also the judgement of a wisdom which uses what in the temporal world is mere wreckage.
. . . The revolts of destructive evil, purely self-regarding, are dismissed into their triviality of merely individual facts; and yet the good they did achieve in individual joy, in individual sorrow, in the introduction of needed contrast, is yet saved by its relation to the completed whole. The image—and it is but an image—the image under which this operative growth of God’s nature is best conceived, is that of a tender care that nothing be lost.13
Not only are all our experiences saved and redeemed within God’s harmonious unification and caring preservation of all events, it is also possible to consciously feel God’s salvation working in every moment of our lives. The feelings of salvation and transcendence of evil that flow forth during cosmic consciousness can be understood as coming from a deep openness to God’s loving embrace and transformation of our every experience.
Evil and Immortality
Our lives have ultimate meaning because the contributions that we make to the world also “contribute everlastingly to the joy of God”14:
This divine life is neither eternal, in the sense of timeless, nor temporal, in the sense of perpetual perishing. Instead it is everlasting, constantly receiving from the world but retaining what in the world is past in the immediacy of its everlasting present. Whitehead saw that “‘everlastingness’ is the content of that vision upon which the finer religions are built—the ‘many’ absorbed everlastingly in the final unity” (PR 527).
This everlasting reality is the kingdom of heaven.15
While process philosophy believes in the real presence of evil in the world, the everlasting reality of the “kingdom of heaven” overcomes evil by providing us with final purpose and safety in God’s being.16 Unfortunately, I do not think that these elements can lend support for a literal reading of Bucke’s claim that cosmic consciousness leads to the intuitive knowledge that “the happiness of every individual is in the long run absolutely certain” (CC 72). For that matter, it does not appear even from Bucke’s biographical accounts that the lives of his case studies always, or even usually, have “happy endings.” However, if “final happiness” is understood in terms of objective immortality, and a sense of salvation in every moment, then process thought can provide a foundation for this intuition. So perhaps we should explore more closely the other characteristic intuition revealed through intellectual illumination: that “all life is eternal” and that the human soul is “immortal.”
The type of immortality that God’s “everlastingness” grants is a form of “objective immortality.” All of a person’s experiences are preserved perfectly and forever within God’s being. Thus one aspect of the intuition of immortality found in cosmic consciousness may be connected to a heightened sensitivity to this dimension of God’s redeeming love. Objective immortality, however, does not necessarily entail subjective immortality, that is, the individual soul’s survival of bodily death. And since Bucke later describes this cosmic intuition of immortality as knowing that “individual existence is continuous beyond what is called death” (CC 76), we must take seriously the question of a literal subjective immortality.17
Process philosophy is open to the possibility of the soul having ongoing adventures after the death of its physical body. This would be envisioned as a continuation of the series of occasions of experience that form the personality or soul, which, due to the intensity of its experiential unifications, is able to survive outside its special physical environment. However, there is nothing within the metaphysics of process thought that would suggest that this type of continuation is necessary, or even highly probable. Could it be that something else is being intuited in these cases which perhaps is being mistaken for the soul’s survival of physical death, something related to another sense of the “eternal?”
Bucke describes this cosmic intuition as knowing “that the life which is in man is eternal, as all life is eternal; that the soul of man is as immortal as God is . . .” (CC 73). On the one hand, this could be interpreted as congruent with Whitehead’s notion of objective immortality—but there appears also to be an additional dimension having to do with a sense of “eternity” that permeates all of reality. In Whitehead’s metaphysics, this sense of eternity is found at the heart of each moment of becoming. Each occasion of experience creates its own moment of time and space. But during the act of self-creation, that occasion is “outside” of time, in an “eternal now”: “every moment is a now, which in this sense is timeless.”18 My suggestion is that cosmic consciousness creates a greatly heightened awareness of the present moment and the influences flowing into it from the unconsciousness depths. One major intuition of this state, therefore, is of the “timelessness” of the moment—of all moments—as it exists in the “eternal now.”19 Bucke writes that this sense of immortality is “not an intellectual conviction . . . nor is it an experience such as learning something before unknown,” but is rather somehow
given as simply and directly as is one’s own sense of individuality (CC 74).
It is difficult for me to see how an intuition of one’s survival of physical death would arise as given from one’s very being, as Bucke describes it; however, a sense of eternity and immortality—as shared by all experiential entities—could arise from a powerful perception of the “eternal now” belonging to every moment, combined with a deep feeling of the reality of God’s redemptive love that absorbs and saves all experiences. One might also imagine how one’s “fear of death” and “sense of sin” might also vanish in the epiphany of the eternal now suffused with God’s loving inspiration and sympathetic preservation.
The Process and Structure of Cosmic Consciousnes
Up to this point, we have looked at a number of the “traits” of cosmic consciousness, but have said relatively little about how this new faculty may come into being. While Bucke focuses primarily on what is revealed through this cosmic sense, near the end of the book, Bucke shares his view on the question of how self-consciousness passes into cosmic consciousness: “So (it seems) are concepts, emotions, sense perceptions, all the spiritual elements of the thinking, feeling, knowing man, individually and collectively builded up until the walls, buttresses, pinnacles and towers of a still higher consciousness are finished. The moment of completion comes, the signal is given, the scaffolding falls and instantly the new structure stands revealed” (CC 381). Basically, Bucke is hypothesizing that a new structuring of the conscious and unconscious mind produces the shift from our normal awareness into the state of cosmic consciousness. If that were true, however, then the attained illumination should become a permanent faculty, or at least one easily accessed and employed. This does not seem to be the case: “In many cases it appears only once, and for a few moments only, but that flash is sufficient to light up (more or less brightly) all the subsequent years of life. In the greatest cases it may be present for many minutes at a time and return at intervals of weeks, months or years” (CC 236-37). Plotinus, one of the great mystics of the ancient world, may have had but eight episodes of illumination (CC 123). In addition, there is an enormous variation in the range and depth of illumination that transpires in different individuals (CC 66-67), and the heightening of faculties that occurs is limited to certain abilities or regions of experience. For example, while the aesthetic sense and religious sensitivities seem to be vastly enhanced in most individuals who receive illumination, learned skills, such as writing, do not receive the same type of enhancement (CC 375).
What I am getting at here is, to think of cosmic consciousness as a movement into a new and complete structure of consciousness both exaggerates the finality of this shift in awareness and misses the possibility that the experience of illumination itself may be a primary cause of the changes in consciousness, rather than the result of a shift in mind structures. Modern consciousness research has demonstrated that mystical experiences, indistinguishable from those cited by Bucke, can be induced in a number of ways including psychedelic substances, sensory deprivation, and special psychophysical techniques.20 In these cases of induced nonordinary states, it seems
almost certain that the observed shifts in consciousness are the result of the techniques involved, or at least are initiated by said methods. Although Bucke recognizes the possibility of inducing experiences of cosmic consciousness, he appears somewhat dubious about both the efficacy of such techniques and the significance of the results of these methods (CC 359-61). I believe that the experience of illumination that delivers one into the reality of cosmic consciousness can be initiated by a wide variety of situations and methods, but that Bucke is correct in his contention that the experience tends to be more powerful and of more long-lasting significance when it appears spontaneously in the life of spirituality-grounded individuals.
But from my process perspective, regardless of whether the experience of illumination is induced or appears on the scene spontaneously, the critical causative factor producing illumination is a sudden rush of primitive feeling from the depths of unconscious experience. This flood of feeling does two things: first, it breaks down old patterns of meaning and the ego defense structures that usually canalize experience into safe and familiar paths of conscious awareness; second, these primitive feelings, which are usually muted or lost through habitual modes of unconscious processing, suddenly break through into full awareness conveying perceptions of dimensions of experience usually hidden from view. This breakdown in the normal structures of experience frees the new occasion to organize the flood of primitive feelings in such a way as to maximize—rather than obstruct—conscious awareness of these deeper levels and meanings. These primitive feelings carry direct and powerful intuitions of the sacred dimensions of reality, of the deeper nature of the self, and of the spirituality suffusing the universe around us.
Cosmic consciousness results from this breakdown of habitual experiential patterns accompanied by a concomitant flooding of consciousness with perceptions and intuitions of a reality never before directly realized—a reality lying below the threshold of self-conscious awareness and only glimpsed from time to time.
The “instantaneousness of the illumination” (CC 75) can be understood to be related to the sudden flooding of awareness with a new range of feelings and the simultaneous reorganizing of the structures of the depth unconscious to accommodate and, more importantly, incorporate and highlight these perceptions. (If the individual is not able to form novel and effective patterns of feeling capable of integrating these powerful unconscious perceptions, there is then a possibility of mental breakdown versus cosmic illumination. This may be why Bucke places such heavy emphasis on the physical and spiritual health displayed by his case studies of cosmic consciousness.) I think that Bucke is correct that in some cases a slight shift in awareness is all that is required to open these floodgates of change, but in other cases, I believe, it is this tidal flow of feelings that instigates the sudden onset of illumination.
The Cosmic Sense of Subjective Light and Ecstasy
Two other aspects of illumination that Bucke emphasizes are the “subjective light” and the “moral elevation” that accompany this state. His hypothesis to the cause of this “light” warrants repeating: “It seems tolerably certain that with illumination there
occurs actual, physical, molecular rearrangement somewhere in the cerebral centers and it is this molecular rearrangement which, when considerable and sudden, gives rise to the phenomenon of the subjective light” (CC 345). I am not convinced of the necessity of hypothesizing significant molecular rearrangement, but I do think that this flood of feeling through the neural networks may actually stimulate the brain/mind system in such a way as to produce an analogue to physical light. However, we should also consider the possibility that this flood of primitive intuitions of spiritual entities and realities may itself convey a form of “light” that reflects the actual inner nature of these entities themselves, and which may thus be represented in our conscious awareness as some type of manifestation of “light.” (A careful examination of Bucke’s case studies will reveal that the quality of the “subjective light” varies tremendously between subjects—where it is found at all—and is a more diverse phenomenon than Bucke seems to realize.21)
The final element in illumination to be dealt with here is “moral elevation”: “At that same instant he is, as it were, bathed in an emotion of joy, assurance, triumph, ‘salvation’” (CC 73); in other words, ecstasy. One part of this experience of emotional elevation can be related directly to the flood of feeling entering into awareness due to the heightened state of openness that has arisen during illumination. Another source of the emotions of joy and triumph and the like can be attributed to the release that comes from the breakdown in ego structures and the associated sense of being connected to something larger. However, a flood of feeling can also be terrifying or painful, as can the loss of ego boundaries, so again we must address what kind of feelings and perceptions are filling awareness in the illumination experience. Here, process philosophy would suggest that feelings of God and other aspects of the spiritual dimension are guiding and contributing to this flow of feeling from the unconscious depths, so that the conscious, subjective feeling becomes one of “moral elevation,” as described by Bucke.
A final factor in this sense of “ecstasy” is the occasion of experience’s perception of its own essence, which, according to process metaphysics, is enjoyment: “In Whitehead’s words, experience is the ‘self-enjoyment of being one among many, and of being one arising out of the composition of many.’ (PR 220.) In this sense, every individual unit of process enjoys its own existence.”22 Besides being more open to other spiritual entities and the depths of nature and the cosmos, the experience of illumination also provides a heightened awareness of one’s own experiential depths. And the basic fact of our own experience is that it is a one arising out of many—that we are in each moment the active unification of the entire universe. The feeling that accompanies this deep realization of who we really are, is ‘enjoyment,’ or perhaps, when felt intensely, even ecstasy.23
Caution about Bucke’s Vision for the Future of Cosmic Consciousness
Let me conclude these ruminations with a consideration of Bucke’s vision that cosmic consciousness represents the future spiritual development of humankind; that it will eventually become an innate faculty that will transform the very definition of what it means to be human:
so will Cosmic Consciousness become more and more universal and appear earlier in the individual life until the race at large will possess this faculty. The same race and not the same; for a Cosmic Conscious race will not be the same race which exists today, any more than the present race of men is the same race which existed prior to the evolution of self-consciousness. . . . This new race is in act of being born from us, and in the near future it will occupy and possess the earth. (CC 383-84)
Bucke also speculates on the possibility of divergent evolution of consciousness, so that some of the population might exhibit various parapsychological powers, while others possess cosmic consciousness (CC 372). In addition, he recognizes the possibility of states of consciousness that are higher than cosmic consciousness, and that humanity may eventually scale these heights (CC 213).
For Bucke, this vision of a future humanity manifesting cosmic consciousness implies a much more deeply and authentically religious world, one in which all of life is governed by a lived spirituality. The old religions will be “melted down,” as religious authority gives way to direct experiential knowledge of sacred realities (CC 5). While process philosophy, and theology, finds great value in Bucke’s vision of our spiritual future, a few of his assumptions bear closer scrutiny, if we are to avoid certain pitfalls.
For example, at the close of Cosmic Consciousness, Bucke seeks to explain “the mystery of religion” (CC 381-82). In short, Bucke argues that the true sources of religion lie in the experiences and insights coming out of cosmic consciousness, but that these insights (for several reasons) have not been clearly understood—or badly misunderstood—by the rest of the world living in the state of everyday self-consciousness. However, when seen for what they really are, an essential unity is perceived in the teachings of all great religious visionaries: “A critical study of all these (seemingly) diverse accounts will show they are all more or less unsuccessful attempts to describe the same thing . . .” (CC 382). But is this true? Are all religions really getting at the same thing, at least in the heart of their mystical insights?
Speaking more definitively, Bucke argues that the faculty of cosmic consciousness “has many names,” including: Nirvana in Buddhism; Christ’s “Kingdom of Heaven”; Paul’s “Christ” or “the Spirit of God”; and “Gabriel” for Mohammed (CC 62). But it is one thing to suggest that all these religious visionaries possessed at times a heightened perception into the depths of the cosmos, and quite another to claim that there is an essential unity to what they brought back from their mystical experiences. Cobb and Griffin argue convincingly that although there are important similarities between Christian and Buddhist structures of existence, there are also real differences. Although it is hoped that these differences represent learning opportunities for both traditions, process philosophy does not understand the experience of Nirvana to be identical with what we might call “Christ Consciousness.” The former is interpreted in terms of an essential openness to the past so that each moment conforms itself perfectly and without bias to “things as they are”:
The ideal for the Buddhist is the nothingness of perfect emptiness. In Whiteheadian terms the individual actual occasion is to realize itself as a void that interposes nothing to the many that would constitute it as one. Practically, this means that the occasion voids itself of self-definition and delimiting aim so as to allow what-is to fill it. The aim is to achieve an optimal fullness by interposing no principle of selection.24
In contrast, Christ Consciousness, from a process perspective, involves a perfect alignment between God’s initial aim and the past purposes of the individual so that one’s very subjectivity is defined by its attunement to God’s creative impulse.25 Extrapolating from this process account of two major types of religious consciousness, it appears that Bucke may be conflating a general mystical state, which he refers to as “cosmic consciousness,” with a much wider range of insights into the depths of reality that may generate at least several authentic religious responses and corresponding structures of consciousness.
The future religious unity that Bucke hypothesizes as a result of cosmic consciousness may be more problematic than he would have guessed: owing in the first place to the variety of possible mystical insights and responses that our complex universe allows, but also due to the great variations in depth and intensity in the experience of cosmic consciousness itself (CC 66-67). For just as self-conscious humanity today is largely incapable of grasping the insights of those possessing the cosmic sense, so too will the insights of the greatest cosmically conscious mystics outstrip the imagination of the generally enlightened population of Bucke’s future world. Nonetheless, these gifted individuals will continue to guide humanity towards new spiritual adventure (provided that we can achieve the necessary spiritual advances to survive the environmental crises of our time), just as they have done throughout history—by helping attune the rest of humanity to the hidden depths of the universe:
The ability to perceive the previously unformulated factors in experience is extremely rare. As Whitehead says, we are not all on the same level in this regard. (RM 121.) The point is that, once someone has perceived them consciously and expressed them verbally, they can then be recognized by others. Whitehead uses the analogy of the tuning fork and the piano. The note on the tuning fork elicits a response from the piano, but only because the piano has a string tuned to the same note (RM 128.).26
Final Words
Bucke’s remarkable book, Cosmic Consciousness, examines individuals who have had powerful experiential openings into the hidden realms containing these still largely “unformulated factors in experience.” Since he wrote this book, the topic of
higher states of consciousness has flourished in the West. While a few of his ideas may have proven to be false leads, the overall thrust of his writing remains as vital today as it was one hundred years ago. One of the principal motivations in my studies has been to find a system of ideas capable of interpreting and contextualizing the kind of experiences and insights found in Bucke’s accounts. Process philosophy has proven to be by far the most useful system that I have discovered for these purpose. I hope I have been able to impart at least a glimpse of how this is so.
NOTES
1 Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., Arkana Books, [1901] 1991). All future citations from Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness will be noted parenthetically by the abbreviation “CC” followed by the appropriate page number.
2 Most of the references in this paper are from Cobb’s and Griffin’s book, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition, which I read carefully in preparation for this essay. Anyone interested in pursuing in more depth the ideas presented here should be able to do so simply by studying Process Theology and comparing it with material from Cosmic Consciousness.
3 John B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976), 139.
4 William James, A Pluralistic Universe, in Frederick Burkhardt and Fredson Bowers, eds., The Works of William James (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 104.
5 Cobb and Griffin, 138.
6 I am employing the changes to Whitehead’s theory of God made by Charles Hartshorne, which are generally accepted by the contemporary community of process thinkers. In Process and Reality, Whitehead describes God as a never-ending process of synthetic unification, which violates his own dictum that God should be the final exemplar of metaphysical principles, not invoked as an exception (see, for example, 343). Thus Hartshorne has suggested that God be conceived as a series of moments of experience, as are all other enduring entities in Whitehead’s metaphysics. The rest of Whitehead’s theories of God are congruent with this interpretation, and are in fact generally more intelligible within the context of Hartshorne’s revision.
7 I prefer to use Griffin’s term, “panexperientialism,” which suggests process philosophy’s view of the universe as completely composed of experiential actualities, while being less obscure than Hartshorne’s term “panentheism,” and avoiding the overly-psychological connotations of “panpsychism.” Panexperientialism points to a less anthropocentric understanding of the essential features of human experience and how these elements can be generalized to describe the basic activity of all entities in the universe. 8 Cobb and Griffin, 151. In this quotation’s parenthetical citation, MT refers to: Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (The Macmillan Company, 1938).
9 Cobb and Griffin, 34.
10 Cobb and Griffin, 20.
11 Cobb and Griffin, 71.
12 Cobb and Griffin, 44.
13 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected edition: David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, eds. (Macmillan Publishing Co.; New York: Free Press paperback edition, [1929] 1979), 346.
14 Cobb and Griffin, 123.
15 Cobb and Griffin, 122. In this quotation’s parenthetical citation, PR refers to: Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (The Macmillan Company, 1929).
16 Cobb and Griffin, 127.
17 Interestingly enough, the one case that Bucke describes as an anomaly, because of its unique perspective on immortality, is actually the closest to Whitehead’s doctrine of “everlastingness” and Hartshorne’s own perspective on personal survival: “He believes, is indeed sure, that after death he will be absorbed into God, and that in losing his individuality he will gain something much more valuable. His feeling, his conviction, his knowledge (as in all these cases) is that the best will happen” (CC 299-300).
18 Cobb and Griffin, 16.
19 It is instructive to note the following quotation, that Bucke cites from Spinosa, which bears directly on this issue of “eternity” as something beyond time: “In all exact knowledge the mind knows itself under the form of eternity; that is to say, in every such act it is eternal and knows itself as eternal. This eternity is not a persistence in time after the dissolution of the body, no more than a pre-existence in time, for it is not commensurable with time at all” (CC 279).
20 For a thorough discussion of the meaning and production of nonordinary states of consciousness, see any number of Stanislav Grof’s books, but especially Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death and Transcendence in Psychotherapy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985) and The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).
21 It may be worth noting that, in regard to Bucke’s characterization of the subjective light as a “sense of being immersed in a flame, or rose-colored cloud” (CC 72), Barbara Ann Brennan locates a “rose energy” in the heart chakra, and writes that “couples in love create a beautiful rose cloud of energy around them” (Light Emerging: The Journey of Personal Healing [New York: Bantam Books, 1993], 180). Thus the experience of a rose-colored light during illumination may be related to an intense activation of the heart chakra.22 Cobb and Griffin, 17.
23 The reader may wish to compare this Whiteheadian notion of intensified “enjoyment” with Bucke’s own ideas concerning the heightened enjoyment that occurs as the level of awareness increases from the simple consciousness found in animals, to the self-conscious state characteristic of contemporary human beings, to the bliss and joy of cosmic consciousness (see especially CC 76-77).
24 Cobb and Griffin, 141. 25 Cobb and Griffin, 105. 26 Cobb and Griffin, 36-37. In this quotation’s parenthetical citation, RM refers to: Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (The Macmillan Company, 1926).
* Presented at the June 30, 2001 SSMR session in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the publication of R. M. Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness, held in conjunction with the INTA Congress, at Harrah’s Hotel in Las Vegas, NV.