Cosmic Consciousness

Early spring, in an English city. Richard Bucke, a Canadian doctor at the very start of his thirty-sixth year, has spent the evening with two friends reading and talking about poetry: Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and above all Walt Whitman.

At midnight they part, and he takes a hansom cab for the long drive home. Nothing about his mood is dramatic. He describes himself as calm, full of the images of the evening, in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment.

Hold on to that detail. The story that follows is not about a man in crisis, fasting, praying or frightened. It is about a contented reader riding home through the dark after a good night with friends.

Then, with no warning of any kind, he finds himself wrapped in what he calls a flame-coloured cloud.

His first thought is entirely practical: fire. Some sudden blaze somewhere in the great city, lighting up the street around the cab. It is the reaction of a sensible man looking for an outside cause.

The next instant that explanation is gone. In his words, "the next he knew that the light was within himself." Nothing outside the cab had changed. The light was inside, not in the street, and that shift, from looking for a fire to realising there was none, is the hinge of everything he later wrote.

When the flame-coloured cloud first surrounded him, what did Bucke take it to be?

• A spiritual vision sent to answer his prayers
• A fire breaking out somewhere in the city✓Correct answer
• A hallucination brought on by exhaustion
• The first light of dawn over the rooftops

His first thought was of a sudden fire in the city, an ordinary outside cause. Only a moment later did he realise the light was within him, and he had not been praying for anything.

What came next was not a picture but a feeling, and then a kind of knowing. First a sense of exultation and immense joy. Then, straight after, what he calls an intellectual illumination "quite impossible to describe."

He reaches for Indian vocabulary rather than church language to say it. Into his brain streamed one lightning-flash of the Brahmic Splendor; onto his heart fell one drop of Brahmic Bliss.

Notice the measures: a flash, a drop. He never claims to have been flooded. He claims a tiny amount of something so concentrated that it left, as he puts it, an aftertaste of heaven for the rest of his life.

Here is the sentence Bucke is most careful about. Among other things, he writes, he "did not come to believe, he saw and knew" a handful of things.

That the cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence. That the human soul is immortal. That the universe is built so that all things work together for the good of each and all. That the foundation principle of the world is what we call love, and that everyone's happiness is, in the long run, certain.

The list is large. The claim about how he got it is the stranger part: not belief, but sight. He is not reporting conclusions he reached. He is reporting things he says he was shown.

Bucke says the cab ride gave him new beliefs about the universe, which he came to hold after thinking the experience over.

False✓Correct answer

He insists on the opposite: he did not come to believe these things, he saw and knew them in the moment itself. The reflection came later and was about what the experience meant, not whether it was true.