{"collection":"Esoteric & Occult","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/eso/cc/cc56.htm","path":"eso/cc/cc56.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/eso/cc/cc56.htm","text":"Cosmic Consciousness, by Richard Maurice Bucke, [1901]\nHorace Traubel.\nWas born December 19, 1858, and was therefore in his thirty-first year at time of his first illumination. His experience is here given in his own words. It is all of it full of interest, but perhaps the most significant thing about it is the manner the intelligence of it was received by Walt Whitman, whose matter of fact, simple words, \"I knew it would come to you,\" carry a depth of meaning quite out of the common. H. T. tells the story of his awakening in this colloquial and direct way, in answer to the inquiries of the editor:\nIt was a month before the immediate effect of this experience wore off. The reflex effect was of course fixed. I can say now (writing 1901) that from that day to this I have never known one moment of despair concerning my spiritual relations to man and the universe. I have my earth troubles and my earth foibles. But the essential faith is adamantine. I have never had any suspicion of immortality. The glimpse of that minute\u2014and of the repeated experiences on the two after occasions mentioned above\u2014into the eternal law left no blot or qualification. I had often said before, in speaking of Whitman (making in a way a true guess): \"Whitman's notion of immortality is not one of logic but is pictorial. He does not believe in immortality. He sees it.\" Many times Whitman had said to me regarding that explanation: \"It is every word true. You hit the nail on the head.\" Now I knew better than I had before\u2014not only better but in a way I could not have known before\u2014what I myself meant when I used the expression: \"Whitman sees.\" I see around and through phenomena. Phenomena is never a wall or a veil. I have been\nOn the night of the Ethical split I was in a position which forced me to be the main spokesman of the party of freedom. I made a speech upon which my enemies even more than my friends congratulated me. Yet when I got on my feet on the floor and plunged into talk I was instantly immersed in the strange light which had visited me on the first experience and simply uttered without thought or reason, formally speaking, the words of the mightier power that possessed me. I have found since that on occasions of crisis I have merely to throw myself back again on this resource to discover that every strength\u2014spiritually speaking\u2014it imparted once it imparts again. In my very busy life, which has its temporal distresses, this is more than a balance in bank and contributes more than any ephemera of material prosperity could towards my victories: in fact is the first and last letter of my power. When the little affairs of every day seem most mixed up, most to be past solution, I am sure finally to make my escape by the avenue of these ameliorating revelations. Not once has the spirit deserted me\u2014not once has the light, in some degree of its radiance, not always of course in full power, failed to appear. The difference it makes in one's life is the difference between preparation and consummation. On the occasion of my second experience (April, 1891), which was not outwardly momentous, I found that my initial self suspicion\u2014my question, Am I unbuilt or built?\u2014did not reappear.\nIf you take my verse \"Illumination\" [and a great deal of H. T.'s verse and prose written since that year], and try to get it statistically languaged, you will find that I have expressed a series of experiences of profound significance to all who have been similarly blessed. I find that my members are no longer at war with each other. When I was a youngster I read my way vigorously and sympathetically back especially into Oriental literature of the religious class blazed a path for the spirit. After 1889 (a hiatus in such reading having intervened) I found myself driven into that old world again, to review these my original impressions. The new light had made my voyage easier and more richly endowed its fruits. Once I felt that religions were all of them religions of despair: now I saw that no religion despairs\u2014that all religion before it becomes and as soon as it ceases to be an affair of institutions resolves itself essentially into light and immortality.\nI should perhaps say that it has invariably happened that someone\u2014and sometimes many persons\u2014have commented to me, and felicitated me, upon my appearance, upon the occasions of my direct contact with what I have grown to call my subliminal self. This may mean much or nothing. But no one could\nYou have said to me: \"State this thing in plain prose.\" But how can I? I could never state it in the prose that would be understood by one who has not shared my sensations. I could never state it in words which would not make it, if you please, prose to those who can enter collaterally into the channels of its august revelation. After asking you: How can I? I have shown you how I could.\nSome things I have said may seem to savor of egotism. But they are simply candid. I am not measuring myself as a genius or an idiot, but as a simple third person whose word and career must be to himself absolute law. I have written you this memorandum impulsively, with no attempt to dress it up, if, indeed, until now it is done, and now I have read it, with any actual understanding of what my pen would commit me to or confess.\nThe following poem was written by Horace Traubel shortly after his illumination and of course strictly belongs here:\nRelease! Escape!\n Shall I speak of the door swung wide, of the unbarred gates?\nAfter the vigil I step across the border-line,\n I take my place with the pioneers.\nHave I met the hour patiently, without fear, at the portal?\n Now is my name called, now the lip of my love has spoken:\n Do I mistake you, O divine Signaler? is it after all some other soul that is hailed?\n My self is my answer:\n There's that in my heart responds, meeting the call with equal voice, establishing forever the unspeakable bond!\nBond that does not bind\u2014bond that frees\u2014bond that discovers and bestows.\nLook! I am flushed with inexhaustible possessions!\n The old measures vanish, I am expanded to infinite sweep.\nO world! Not dead to you\u2014only seeing you, knowing you, at last,\n Mixed with countless worlds, knowing with you your companions also:\nO year! Not dead to you\u2014only seeing you, knowing you, at last,\n Mixed with all time, untangling the knotted thread: p. 349\nO world! O year!\u2014\n Before birth seeing birth, after life seeing life!\nThe infinite blue, heaven's fond eye, opens upon me.\nO voice, mastering me, making me too master\u2014\n My ear is close, I hear the syllables fall,\n Waves on shores of the farther worlds, waves on shores of the day.\nThe clouds part: O face\u2014O face\u2014O face!\u2014\n Face smiling upon me\u2014smiling me wings, buoyant beyond the discarded cheapened present.\n(You, too, O present, still remaining,\n Duly visiting my heart, not forbidden,\n Yet yielding the place supreme).\nI am all eye\u2014O God! you are all speech:\n Melody celestial\u2014sight and voice, color and tone, warring no more,\n In the boundless blue uplifted.\nWhose hand touches me?\u2014my brow\u2014my breast\u2014my own unasking hand\u2014\n Leading me out of self to self?\nDivine form\u2014mother, father\u2014sex only now standing revealed, the union irreversible:\n Divine form, I made whole in you,\n The elements diverse here blended.\nThis minute grown infinite, the far worlds spread before me,\n The endless drift of soul, the long stretch of faces, all lit by the divine sun\u2014\n Or swift or slow or early or late the line not anywhere broken,\n All\u2014all\u2014equally sustained, swept in the same destiny, on sea and land of life,\n The peak lit for all, the triumph inevitable.\nO my soul! look yet again:\n There too are you, a figure in the panorama,\n On your brow the dawn has set its beauteous beam,\n Here with me\u2014there not with me.\nDeath fills me with its abundance.\n What is this flood, overcoming body and sense?\n I feel the walls of my skull crack, the barriers part, the sun-flood enter\u2014\n Love, lore, not lost, only magnified, floating eternal seas of essence\u2014\n Before and behind births and deaths, spiritual gravitation, the emergence ever-more expanding. p. 350\nO soul, have I lost you or found you?\n Found! the faultless circle born at last to you,\n After the waiting years.\nFar eras behind, far eras ahead, the simple few years I finger,\n Shafts from the central sun,\n Speeding for fuller fruition the orbs of space.\nBack to the first word of speech,\n On to the last utterance of seers,\n My soul, knowing its own, wrapt in its protean habit, catches the perfect song.\nGod! I am circled\u2014I am drunk with the influx of life\u2014\n Wheeled in your orbit\u2014given the word I would speak yet must withhold\u2014\n Leaving you, O my brother, each one, to say it for yourself.\nBrothers, worlds, I greet you!\n The wheel turns, the boundless prospect opens:\n All, all complicate\u2014the light bearing limitlessly the burdens of all.\n Do you think that you are missed, that the large heart beats not for you?\n That somewhere on the road you must faint and die?\n Strength will be given for all your need,\n And the weakest, when the night comes which is the day,\n Will greet the king, a giant in stature and grace.\nNow the immortal years, the ceaseless round realized\u2014\n The doubts shorn of wing and foot,\n The farthest league nearest, and the multiplied infinities choking here in my breast.\nO my questioner! you do not suspect me\u2014you suspect yourself:\n To-morrow, seeing yourself, you will see me,\n And the illumined spirit, passing the portal,\n God-grown, will hail me proudly [60a:40].\nHad we no other writings by this man, these lines alone to all who can understand them\u2014and they are as clear as day from the point of view of this volume\u2014would be proof of illumination. But we have much else. A series of writings in prose and verse extending over the last ten years gives us more evidence than is needed.\nThen there is something else to say. Horace Traubel (as he intimates himself in his own words, above) belongs with Blake, Yepes, Behmen, Swedenborg and others, in the class of what may\nbe called automatic writers. These men give their inspiration free way\u2014they drop the reins on his neck and let the horse go. What they write under the divine impulse, for those who can follow their thought, is divine, but to those who can not, is, as Paul says, juit in this connection, \"foolishness.\"\nPerhaps all these men write automatically, but, in the case of some of them, the expression as it flows from the Cosmic Sense, or as afterwards modified by the self conscious intellect, is more intelligible to the \"natural man\" than in the case of others. In not one of them does the meaning lie on the surface\u2014they all call for and demand long continued and thoughtful reading. Whitman and Paul are just as unintelligible as Behmen or Swedenborg, until the right point of view is reached, although Whitman (for his part) wrought his whole life, \"returning upon (his) poems, lingering long,\" in order to render them absorbable by the race.\nHorace Traubel has not escaped the curse of his tribe\u2014unintelligibility. But in spite of it he has produced his effect. And this is the strangest thing of all\u2014that it should be possible for a man to speak or write what cannot be understood, but to do it in such a divine way that his words shall be revered and remembered through the ages. The \"Shakespeare\" Sonnets have never been understood, and are yet accepted for what they really are\u2014a revelation.\nHorace Traubel has many readers who understand him, and even those who do not comprehend him fully are impressed by his personality, through which streams unmistakably the divine light.","title":"Cosmic Consciousness: Part V. Additional: Chapter 33. Horace Traubel","type":"page"}