Cosmic Consciousness

1901 book by Richard Bucke

Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind

The title page

Author| Richard Maurice Bucke
Language| English
Subject| Consciousness
Published| 1901
Publisher| Citadel Press
Publication place| United States
Media type| Print
Pages| 358
ISBN| 978-0-8065-0211-3

Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind is a 1901 book by the psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke, in which the author explores the concept of cosmic consciousness, which he defines as "a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary man".[1]

## Synopsis

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In Cosmic Consciousness, Bucke stated that he discerned three forms, or degrees, of consciousness:[2] simple consciousness, possessed by both animals and mankind; Self-consciousness, possessed by mankind, encompassing thought, reason, and imagination, and Cosmic consciousness, which is "a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary man"[1] According to Bucke, "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; a great deal of this is, of course, from the point of view of self consciousness, absurd; it is nevertheless undoubtedly true."[3]

## Reception

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Moores said that Bucke's cosmic consciousness is an interconnected way of seeing things "which is more of an intuitive knowing than it is a factual understanding".[4] Moores pointed out that, for scholars of the purist camp, the experience of cosmic consciousness is incomplete without the element of love, "which is the foundation of mystical consciousness".[4] Juan A. Herrero Brasas said that Bucke's cosmic consciousness refers to the evolution of the intellect, and not to "the ineffable revelation of hidden truths".[5] According to Brasas, it was William James who equated Bucke's cosmic consciousness with mystical experience or mystical consciousness.[5] Gary Lachman notes that today Bucke's experience would most likely be explained by the "God spot", or more generally as a case of temporal lobe epilepsy, but he is skeptical of these and other organic explanations.[6]

## Similar concepts

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According to Michael Robertson, Cosmic Consciousness and William James's 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience have much in common:[7] "Both Bucke and James argue that all religions, no matter how seemingly different, have a common core; both believe that it is possible to identify this core by stripping away institutional accretions of dogma and ritual and focusing on individual experience; and both identify mystical illumination as the foundation of all religious experience."[7] James popularized the concept of religious experience,[note 1] which he explored in his 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience.[9][10] He saw mysticism as a distinctive experience which supplies knowledge of the transcendental.[11] He considered the "personal religion"[12] to be "more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism".

## Editions

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* Bucke, Richard Maurice (1901), Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (First ed.), New York: E. P. Dutton and Company - via Internet Archive

## See also

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* Peak experience – Concept in psychology
* Spiritual evolution – Evolution of the mind or spirit

## References

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### Notes

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1. ^ The term "religious experience" has become synonymous with the terms "mystical experience", "spiritual experience", and "sacred experience".[8]

### Citations

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1. ^ a b Bucke 2009, p. 1.
2. ^ Bucke 2009, p. 1-3.
3. ^ Bucke 2009, p. 17–18.
4. ^ a b Moores 2006, p. 33.
5. ^ a b Brasas 2010, p. 53.
6. ^ Lachman 2003, p. 7.
7. ^ a b Robertson 2010, p. 133.
8. ^ Samy 1998, p. 80.
9. ^ Hori 1999, p. 47.
10. ^ Sharf 2000.
11. ^ Harmless 2007, pp. 10–17.
12. ^ James 1982, p. 30.

### Works cited

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* Brasas, Juan A. Hererro (2010), Walt Whitman's Mystical Ethics of Comradeship: Homosexuality and the Marginality of Friendship at the Crossroads of Modernity, SUNY Press, ISBN 978-1438430126.
* Bucke, Richard Maurice (2009). Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications. ISBN 978-0-486-47190-7.
* Harmless, William (2007), Mystics, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0198041108.
* Hori, Victor Sogen (1999), "Translating the Zen Phrase Book" (PDF), Nanzan Bulletin, 23.
* James, William (1982) [1902], The Varieties of Religious Experience, Penguin classics, ISBN 9780140390346.
* Lachman, Gary (2003), A Secret History of Consciousness, SteinerBooks, ISBN 9781584200116.
* Moores, D. J. (2006), Mystical Discourse in Wordsworth and Whitman: A Transatlantic Bridge, Peeters Publishers, ISBN 978-9042918092.
* Robertson, Michael (2010), Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0691146317.
* Samy, Ama (1998), Waarom kwam Bodhidharma naar het Westen? De ontmoeting van Zen met het Westen, Asoka: Asoka, ISBN 9789056700249.
* Sharf, Robert H. (2000), "The Rhetoric of Experience and the Study of Religion" (PDF), Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7 (11–12): 267–87, archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-05-13, retrieved 2014-03-2211–12&rft.pages=267-87&rft.date=2000&rft.aulast=Sharf&rft.aufirst=Robert+H.&rft_id=http://buddhiststudies.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/sharf/documents/Sharf1998,%20Religious%20Experience.pdf&rfr_id=info:sid/en.wikipedia.org:Cosmic+Consciousness" class="Z3988">.

## Further reading

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* Bridgers, Lynn (2005), Contemporary Varieties of Religious Experience: James's Classic Study in Light of Resiliency, Temperament, and Trauma, Rowman & Littlefield, ISBN 978-0742544321.
* James, William (1987), William James: Writings 1902 – 1910, New York: The Library of America, ISBN 978-0-940450-38-7.
* Marshall, Paul (2005), Mystical Encounters with the Natural World: Experiences and Explanations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0199279432.
* Paglia, Camille (Winter 2003), "Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s" (PDF), Arion, 10 (3): 57–111.

* v
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Consciousness

Figures|

| Philosophy|

* Alfred North Whitehead
* Arthur Schopenhauer
* Baruch Spinoza
* Bertrand Russell
* Brian O'Shaughnessy
* Charles Augustus Strong
* Christopher Peacocke
* Colin McGinn
* Daniel Dennett
* David Chalmers
* David Hume
* David Papineau
* David Pearce
* Donald Davidson
* Douglas Hofstadter
* Edmund Husserl
* Frank Jackson
* Fred Dretske
* Galen Strawson
* George Berkeley
* George Henry Lewes
* Georges Rey
* Gottfried Leibniz
* Immanuel Kant
* John Eccles
* John Locke
* John Polkinghorne
* John Searle
* Joseph Levine
* Karl Popper
* Keith Frankish
* Kenneth M. Sayre
* Maurice Merleau-Ponty
* Max Velmans
* Michael Tye
* Martin Heidegger
* Ned Block
* Patricia Churchland
* Paul Churchland
* Philip Goff
* René Descartes
* Thomas Metzinger
* Thomas Nagel
* William Kingdon Clifford
* William Lycan
* William Seager

|

Psychology|

* Carl Gustav Jung
* Donald D. Hoffman
* Franz Brentano
* Gustav Fechner
* Julian Jaynes
* Kurt Koffka
* Max Wertheimer
* Sigmund Freud
* Wilhelm Wundt
* William James
* Wolfgang Köhler

Neuroscience|

* Anil Seth
* Antonio Damasio
* Benjamin Libet
* Bernard Baars
* Christof Koch
* Francis Crick
* Francisco Varela
* Gerald Edelman
* Giulio Tononi
* Karl Pribram
* Lawrence Weiskrantz
* Michael Gazzaniga
* Michael Graziano
* Patrick Wilken
* Roger Sperry
* Stanislas Dehaene
* Steven Laureys
* Stuart Hameroff
* Wolf Singer

Others|

* Annaka Harris
* David Bohm
* Eugene Wigner
* Erwin Schrödinger
* Marvin Minsky
* Max Planck
* Roger Penrose
* Susan Blackmore
* Victor J. Stenger
* Wolfgang Pauli

Theories|

| Philosophy of mind|

* Anomalous monism
* Computationalism
* Double-aspect theory
* Eliminative materialism
* Emergentism
* Epiphenomenalism
* Functionalism
* Idealism
* Interactionism
* Materialism
* Mind–body dualism
* Monism
* Neutral monism
* New mysterianism
* Nondualism
* Panpsychism
* Parallelism
* Physicalism
* Property dualism
* Reflexive monism
* Revisionary materialism
* Solipsism
* Type physicalism (reductive materialism, identity theory)

|

Science|

* Attention schema theory
* Consciousness causes collapse
* Dynamic core hypothesis
* Damasio's theory of consciousness
* Electromagnetic theories of consciousness
* Global workspace theory
* Higher-order theories of consciousness
* Holonomic brain theory
* Integrated information theory
* Lamme's recurrent feedback hypothesis
* Multiple drafts model
* Orchestrated objective reduction

Topics|

* Agnosia
* Altered state of consciousness
* Animal consciousness
* Artificial consciousness
* Attention
* Attentional control
* Awareness
* Binding problem
* Binocular rivalry
* Blindsight
* Brain
* Cartesian theater
* Consciousness after death
* Disorders of consciousness
* Divided consciousness
* Dual consciousness (split-brain)
* Experience
* Explanatory gap
* Free will
* Flash suppression
* Hallucination
* Hard problem of consciousness
* Heterophenomenology
* Higher consciousness
* Illusion
* Introspection illusion
* Knowledge argument
* Locked-in syndrome
* Mind
* Mind–body problem
* Minimally conscious state
* Neural correlates of consciousness
* Neurophenomenology
* Ontology
* Phenomenology
* Philosophical zombie
* Philosophy of mind
* Primary consciousness
* Problem of other minds
* Qualia
* Quantum mind
* Reentry
* Sakshi
* Purusha
* Secondary consciousness
* Sentience
* Sentientism
* Sociology of human consciousness
* Soul
* Stream of consciousness
* Subconscious
* Subjective character of experience
* Subjectivity and objectivity
* Unconscious mind
* Unconsciousness
* Upanishads
* Visual masking
* Consciousness causes collapse
* Yogachara

Works|

* A Universe of Consciousness
* Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness
* Consciousness and Cognition
* Consciousness Explained
* Cosmic Consciousness
* How the Self Controls Its Brain
* Journal of Consciousness Studies
* Online Consciousness Conference
* Psyche
* The Astonishing Hypothesis
* The Conscious Mind
* The Emperor's New Mind
* The Science of Consciousness
* Understanding Consciousness
* "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"
* Wider than the Sky

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