Cosmic Consciousness

Richard M. Bucke · 1901

5.0 · 6 ratings

About the book

A Canadian asylum superintendent had a fifteen-minute experience in a hansom cab, and spent the rest of his life cataloguing everyone he believed had had the same one. The case list runs from the Buddha to Walt Whitman, who happened to be his friend.

Try the short course

Part 1 · A cab ride after midnight. The first six slides, free.

A cab ride after midnight

0 XP

1 / 6

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.

Inside the course

20 parts

The night in the hansom cab: Bucke's own caseFree above
Three kinds of consciousness — simple, self, cosmic
Evolution and devolution: how a faculty arrives in a race
On the plane of self-consciousness: the mind before the change
From self to cosmic: the step itself
The marks Bucke uses to identify a case
Sudden onset, the age of thirty-five, and the light
The Buddha, and the earliest instances
Jesus and Paul, read as cases rather than as doctrine
Plotinus, Mohammed, and the mystics of the middle
Dante, Las Casas, John of the Cross
Francis Bacon, and the Shakespeare question Bucke could not resist
Blake, Behmen, and the visionary line
Balzac: Louis Lambert and Séraphîta
Whitman: Bucke's friend, and his best evidence
Edward Carpenter and the living witnesses
The lesser and doubtful cases, from Moses to Spinoza
Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, Tennyson — and the anonymous letters
Cosmic consciousness as the next evolutionary step
What Bucke got wrong, and why the book still matters

Questions

Is Cosmic Consciousness free to read in Astra Trainer?

Yes. The full book opens free in the app’s reader, in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian.

What is the short course?

20 short parts that walk through the book’s key ideas in slides, each with a quick quiz. The first six slides are free to try on this page.

Where do I get the app?

Astra Trainer is free on the App Store and Google Play. Cosmic Consciousness is waiting in the app’s library.