MODERN EXAMPLES OF INTELLECTUAL COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS: EMERSON; TOLSTOI;
BALZAC
Passing over the ancient philosophers, Aristotle, Albertus Magnus,
Plotinus, Marcus Aurelius, Pascal, Socrates, Plato, Aspasia, and others,
all of whom had glimpsed, if not fully attained, cosmic consciousness, we
come to a consideration of those cases in our own day and age, in which
this superior consciousness has found expression through intellectual
rather than through religious channels.
Of these latter, no more illustrious example can be cited than that of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the sage of Concord.
Emerson's nature was essentially religious, but his religion was not of the
emotional quality so often found among enthusiasts, and which is almost
always openly expressed when this religious enthusiasm is not balanced by
intellectuality.
Analysis is frequently a foe to inspiration, but there are fare instances
where the intellect is of such a penetrating and extraordinary quality that
it carries the power of analysis into the unseen; in fact what we
habitually term the unseen is a part of the visible to this type of mind.
True intellect is a natural inheritance, a karmic attribute. The spurious
kind is the result of education, and it invariably has its limitations. It
stops short of the finer vibrations of consciousness and denies the reality
of the inner life of man--which inner life constitutes the _real_ to the
character of intellect that penetrates beyond _maya_.
Of such a quality of intellect is that exemplified in Emerson. No mere
tabulator of facts was he, but a dissector of the causes back of all the
manifestation which he observed and studied and classified with the mental
power of a god.
Nor is there lacking ample proof that Emerson experienced the phenomenon of
the suddenness of cosmic consciousness--a degree of which he seems to have
possessed from earliest youth.
In his essay on Nature, we find these words:
"Crossing a bare common in snow puddles at twilight, under a clouded sky,
without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I
have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear."
Emerson here alluded to a feeling of fear, which seems to have been
experienced during a certain stage by many of those who have entered into
cosmic consciousness. This fear is doubtless due to the presence in the
human organism of what we may term the "animal instinct," which is an
inheritance of the physical body. This same peculiar phenomenon oppresses
almost everyone when coming into contact with a new and hitherto untried
force.
A certain lady, who relates her experience in entering into the cosmic
conscious state, says: "A certain part of me was unafraid, certain, secure
and content, at the same time my mortal consciousness felt an almost
overwhelming sense of fear."
Continuing, Emerson says:
"All mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I
see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am
part or particle of God."
Emerson's powerful intellect would naturally describe such an experience
in intellectual terms rather than, as in the instances heretofore recorded,
in religious phraseology, but it must not be inferred that Emerson was less
religious, in the true sense, than was Mohammed or St. Paul.
Emerson lived in an age when orthodoxy flourished, and he and his
associates of the Transcendentalist cult, were regarded as non-religious,
if not actually heretical. Therefore, it is that Emerson's keen intellect
was brought to bear upon everything he encountered, not only in his own
intimate experience but also in all that he read and heard, lest he be
trapped into committing the error which he saw all about him, namely, of
mistaking an accepted viewpoint as an article of actual faith. His way to
the Great Light lay through the jungle of the mind, but he found the path
clear and plain and he left a torchlight along the way.
Emerson fully recognized the illusory character of external life, and the
eternal verity of the soul, as witness:
"If the red slayer thinks he slays,
Or if the slain thinks he is slain,
They know not well, the subtle ways,
I keep and pass and turn again."
Horrible as is war, because of the spirit of hate and destruction it
embodies and keeps alive, yet the fact remains that man in his soul knows
that he can neither slay nor be slain by the mere act of destroying the
physical shell called the body. It is inconceivable that human beings would
lend themselves to warfare, if they did not know, as a part of that area of
supra-consciousness, that there is a _something_ over which bullets have no
power.
This fact, regarded as a more or less vague _belief_ to the majority,
becomes incontrovertible fact to the person who has entered cosmic
consciousness. His view is reversed, and where he formerly looked from the
sense-conscious plane forward into a _possible_ spiritual plane, he now
gazes back over the path from the spiritual heights and sees the winding
road that led upward to the elevation, much as a traveller on the mountain
top looks back and for the first time sees all of the devious trail over
which he has, climbed to his present vantage point. During the journey
there had been many times when he could only see the next step ahead, and
nothing but his faith in the assurance of his fellow men who had attained
the summit of that mountain, could ever have sustained him through the
perils of the climb, but once on the heights, his backward view takes in
the details of the journey and sees not "through a glass darkly," but in
the clear light of achievement.
Such is the effect of cosmic consciousness to the one who has seen the
light.
"One of the benefits of a college education," says Emerson, "is to show the
boy its little avail."
Does this imply that an unlettered mind is desirable? Not necessarily, but
there is a phase of intellectual culture that is detrimental while it
lasts.
It is as though one were to choke up a perfectly flowing stream which
yielded the moisture to fertile lands, by filling the bed of the stream
with rocks and sticks.
The flow of the spiritual currents becomes clogged by the activities of the
mind in its acquisition of mere knowledge, and before that knowledge has
been turned into wisdom. The same truth is expressed in the aphorism "a
little knowledge is a dangerous thing." It is dangerous because it chains
the mind to the external things of life, whereas the totally unlettered (we
do not use the term ignorant here) person will, if he have his heart filled
with love, perceive the reality of spiritual things that transcend mere
knowledge of the physical universe.
Beyond this plane of mortal mind-consciousness, which is fitly described as
"dangerous," there is the wide open area of cosmic _perception_, which may
lead ultimately to the limitless areas of cosmic consciousness. If,
therefore, an education, whether acquired in or out of college, so whets
the grain of the mind that it becomes keen and fine enough to realize that
knowledge is valuable _ONLY_ as it leads to real wisdom, then indeed it is
a benefit; unless it does this, it is temporarily an obstruction.
Out of the lower into the higher vibration; out of sense-consciousness into
cosmic consciousness; out of organization and limitations into freedom--the
freedom of perfection, is the law and the purpose. This Emerson with his
clearness of spiritual vision, saw, and this premise he subjected to the
microscopic lens of his penetrating intellect. In his essay on Fate he
says:
"Fate involves amelioration. No statement of the Universe can have any
soundness which does not admit its ascending effort. The direction of the
whole and of the parts is toward benefit. Behind every individual closes
organization; before him opens liberty. * * * The Better; the Best. The
first and worse races are dead. The second and imperfect races are dying
out, or remain for the maturing of higher. In the latest race, in man,
every generosity, every new perception, the love and praise he extorts from
his fellows, are certificates of advance _out of fate into freedom_."
This phrase, "out of fate into freedom," may be read to mean, literally,
out of the bondage of the sense-conscious life which entails rebirth and
continued experience, into the light of Illumination which makes us free.
Further commenting, Emerson says:
"Liberation of the will from the sheaths and clogs of organization which he
has outgrown _is the end and aim of the world_ * * * The whole circle of
animal life--tooth against tooth, devouring war, war for food, a yelp of
pain and a grunt of triumph, until at last the whole menagerie, the whole
chemical mass, is mellowed and refined _for higher use_ * * *"
The sense of unity which is so inseparable from the cosmic conscious
state, was always uppermost in Emerson's mind. Neither did he ever
present as unity that state of consciousness that may be termed
organization-consciousness--group-consciousness it is often called. He
realized that the person who stands for Individualism is much more than
apt to recognize his indissoluble relationship with the Cosmos. A
perception of unity is a complement of Individualism.
That which, in modern metaphysical phraseology, is best termed "The
Absolute," was expressed by Emerson as the Over-Soul, and this term meant
something much greater, more unescapable than the anthropomorphic God of
the church-goers. His assurance of unity with this Divine Spiritual Essence
was perfect. It savors more of what is termed the religious view of life
than of the philosophic, but we contend that in the coming era of the
cosmic conscious man, all life will be religious, in the true sense, and
that there will be no dividing line between philosophy and worship, because
worship will consist of living the life of the spiritual man, and not in
any set forms or rites. Bearing upon this we find Emerson saying:
"Not thanks, not prayer, seem quite the highest or truest name for our
communion with the infinite--but glad and conspiring reception--reception
that becomes giving in its turn as the receiver is only the All-Giver in
part and in infancy. I cannot--nor can any man--speak precisely of things
so sublime, but it seems to me the wit of man, his strength, his grace, and
his tendency, his art, is the grace and the presence of God. It is beyond
explanation. When all is said and done, _the rapt saint is found the only
logician._ Not exhortation nor argument becomes our lips, but paeans of joy
and praise. But not of adulation; we are too nearly related in the deep of
the mind to that we honor. It is God in us that checks the language of
petition by a grander thought. In the bottom of the heart it is said, 'I am
and by me, O child, this fair body and world of thine stands and grows; I
am, all things are mine; and all mine are thine.'"
We could quote passages from the essays ad infinitum, showing conclusively
that the cosmic conscious plane had been attained and retained by this
great philosopher--one of the first of the early part of the century, which
has been prophesied as the beginning of the first faint lights of the Dawn,
but enough has been offered for our present purpose, that of establishing
the salient points of the cosmic conscious man or woman, which points are
the complete assurance of the eternal verity and indestructibility of the
soul; of its ultimate and inevitable victory over _maya_ or the "wheel of
causation"; and the joyousness and the sense of at-one-ness with the
universe, which comes to the illumined one, bespeaking an unquenchable
optimism and an utter destruction of the sense of sin--points which
characterize all who have attained to this supra-conscious state of
Being.
These points are all expressed repeatedly in all Emerson's utterances and
mark him as one of the most illumined philosophers, as he was one of the
greatest intellects of the last century, or of any other century.
LEO TOLSTOI: RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHER
A strange, lonely and wonderful figure was Tolstoi, novelist, philosopher,
socialist, artist and reformer.
Great souls are always lonely souls, estimated by sense-conscious humans.
In the midst of the so-called pleasures and luxuries of the senses, a wise
soul appears as barren of comfort as is a desert of foliage.
Without the divine optimism that comes from soul-consciousness, such a one
could not endure the life of the body: without the absolute assurance that
comes with cosmic consciousness, men like the late Count Tolstoi must needs
die of soul-loneliness.
From early childhood up to the time of his Illumination Tolstoi indulged in
seriousness of thought. Like Mohammed, great and overpowering desire to
fathom the mystery of death took possession of him. He was ever haunted by
an excessive dread of the "darkness of the grave," and in his essay,
"Childhood," he describes with that wonderful realism, which characterizes
all his works, the effect on a child's mind of seeing the face of his dead
mother. This may be taken in a sense as biographical, although it is not
probable that Tolstoi here alludes to the death of his own mother as she
died when he was too young to have remembered. He describes the scene in
the words of Irteniev:
"I could not believe that this was her face. I began to look at it more
closely, and gradually discovered in it the familiar and beloved features.
I shuddered with fear when I became sure that it was indeed she, but why
were the closed eyes so fallen in? Why was she so terribly pale, and why
was there a blackish mark under the clear skin on one cheek?"
A terror of death, and yet a haunting urge that compelled him to be forever
thinking upon the mystery of it, is the dominant note in every line of
Tolstoi's writings up to the time which he describes as "a change" that
came over him.
For example, when Count Leo was in his 33d year, his brother Nicolai died.
Leo was present at the bedside and described the scene with the utmost
frankness regarding its effect upon his mind; and again we note that awful
fear and hopeless questioning which characterizes the sense-conscious man
whose intellect has been cultivated to the very edge of the line which
separates the self-conscious life from the cosmic conscious.
This questioning, with the fear and dread and terror of death and of the
"ceaseless round of births" and the cares and sorrows of existence was
what drove Prince Siddhartha from his father's court and Mohammed into the
mountains to meditate and pray until the answer came in the light of
illumination.
It came to Tolstoi through the very intensity of his powers of reason and
analysis; through the sword-like quality of mental urge--a much more
sorrowful path than the one through the simple way of love and service and
prayer.
His comments upon the death of his brother give us a vivid idea of the
state of mind of the Tolstoi of that age:
"Never in my life has anything had such an effect upon me. He was right
(referring to his brother's words) when he said to me there is nothing
worse than death, and if you remember that death is the inevitable goal of
all that lives, then it must be confessed that there is nothing poorer than
life. Why should we be so careful when at the end of all things nothing
remains of what was once Nicolai Tolstoi? Suddenly he started up and
murmured in alarm: 'What is this?' He saw that he was passing into
nothingness."
From the above it will be seen that the Tolstoi of those days was a
materialist pure and simple. "He saw that he was passing into nothingness,"
he said of his brother, as though there could be no question as to the
nothingness of the individual consciousness that he had known as Nicolai,
his brother.
This soul-harrowing materialism haunted Tolstoi during all the years of his
youth and early manhood, and threw him constantly into fits of melancholy
and inner brooding. He could neither dismiss the subject from his mind, nor
could he bring into the area of his mortal consciousness that serene
contemplation and optimistic line of reasoning which marks all that Emerson
wrote.
Tolstoi's morbid horror of decay and death was not in any sense due to a
lack of physical courage. It was the inevitable repulsion of a strong and
robust animalism of the body, coupled with a powerful mentality--both of
which are barriers to the "still small voice" of the soul, through which
alone comes the conviction of the nothingness of death.
A biographer says of Tolstoi:
"The fit of the fear of death which at the end of the seventies brought him
to the verge of suicide, was not the first and apparently not the last and
at any rate not the only one. He felt something like it fifteen years
before when his brother Nicolai died. Then he fell ill and conjectured the
presence of the complaint that killed his brother--consumption. He had
constant pain in his chest and side. He had to go and try to cure himself
in the Steppe by a course of koumiss, and did actually cure himself.
Formerly these recurrent attacks of spiritual or physical weakness were
cured in him, not by any mental or moral upheavals, but simply by his
vitality, its exuberance and intoxication."
The birth of the new consciousness which came to Tolstoi a few years later,
was born into existence through these terrible struggles and mental
agonies, inevitable because of the very nature of his heredity and
education and environment. Although as we know, he came of gentle-folk,
there was much of the Russian peasant in Tolstoi's makeup. His organism,
both as to physical and mental elements, was like a piece of solid iron,
untempered by the refining processes of an inherent spirituality. His
never-ceasing struggle for attainment of the degree of cosmic consciousness
which he finally reached was wholly an intellectual struggle. He possessed
such a power of analysis, such a depth of intellectual perception, that he
must needs go on or go mad with the strain of the question unanswered.
To such a mind, the admonition to "never mind about those questions; don't
think about them," fell upon dull ears. He could no more cease thinking
upon the mysteries of life and death than he could cease respiration. Nor
could he blindly trust. He must _know_. Nothing is more unescapable than
the soul's urge toward freedom--and freedom can be won only by liberation
from the bondage of illusion.
Tolstoi's friends and biographers agree that along about his forty-fifth
year, a great moral and religious change took place. The whole trend of his
thoughts turned from the mortal consciousness to that inner self whence
issues the higher qualities of mankind.
From a man who, although he was a great writer and a Russian nobleman, was
yet a man like others of his kind, influenced by traditionary ideas of
class and outward appearance; a man of conventional habits and ideas;
Tolstoi emerged a free soul. He shook off the illusion of historical life
and culture, and stood upon free, moral ground, estimating himself and his
fellows by means of an insight which ignores the world's conventions and
despises the world's standards of success. In short, Tolstoi had received
Illumination and henceforth should he reckoned among those of the new
birth.
In his own words, written in 1879, this change is described:
"Five years ago a change took place in me. I began to experience at first
times of mental vacuity, of cessation of life, as if I did not know why I
was to live or what I was to do. These suspensions of life always found
expression in the same problem, 'Why am I here?' and then 'What next?' I
had lived and lived and gone on and on till I had drawn near a precipice; I
saw clearly that before me there lay nothing but destruction. With all my
might I endeavored to escape from this life. And suddenly I, a happy man,
began to hide my bootlaces that I might not hang myself between the
wardrobes in my room when undressing at night; and ceased to take a gun
with me out shooting, so as to avoid temptation by these two means of
freeing myself from this life. * * *
"I lived in this way (that is to say, in communion with the people) for two
years; and a change took place in me. What befell me was that the life of
our class--the wealthy and cultured--not only became repulsive to me, but
lost all significance. All our actions, our judgments, science, and art
itself, appeared to me in a new light. I realized that it was all
self-indulgence, and that it was useless to look for any meaning in it. I
hated myself and acknowledged the truth. Now it had all become clear to
me."
From this time on, Tolstoi's life was that of one who had entered into
cosmic consciousness, as we note the effects in others. Desire for solitude
a taste for the simple, natural things of life, possessed him. The
primitive peasants and their coarse but wholesome food appealed to him. It
was not a penance that Tolstoi imposed upon himself, that caused him to
abandon the life of a country gentleman for that of a hut in the woods.
The penance would come to such a one from enforced living in the glare of
the world's artificialities. Cosmic consciousness bestows above all things
a taste for simplicity; it restores the normal condition of mankind, the
intimacy with nature and the feeling of kinship with nature-children.
It is not our purpose here to enter into any detailed biography of these
instances of cosmic consciousness. The point we wish to make is the fact
that the birth of this new consciousness frequently comes through much
mental travail and agonies of doubt, speculation and questioning; but that
it is worth the price paid, however seemingly great, there can be no
possible distrust.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Balzac should head this chapter, if we were considering these philosophers
in chronological order, as Balzac was born in 1799, preceding Emerson by a
matter of four years. But Balzac's peculiar temperament, might almost be
classed as a religious rather than strictly intellectual example of cosmic
consciousness. Of the latter phase or expression of this "new" sense, as
present-day writers frequently call it, Emerson is the most perfect
example, because he was the most balanced; the most literary, in the
strict interpretation of the word.
Balzac's place in literature is due far more to his wonderful spiritual
insight, and his powerful imagination, than to his intellectuality, or to
literary style. But that he was an almost complete case of cosmic
consciousness is evident in all he wrote and in all he did. His life was
absolutely consistent with the cosmic conscious man, living in a world
where the race consciousness has not yet risen to the heights of the
spiritually conscious life.
Bucke comments upon his decision against the state of matrimony, because,
as Balzac himself declared, it would be an obstacle to the perfectibility
of his interior senses, and to his flight through the spiritual worlds, and
says: "When we consider the antagonistic attitude of so many of the great
cases toward this relation (Gautama, Jesus, Paul, Whitman, etc.), there
seems little doubt that anything like general possession of cosmic
consciousness must abolish marriage as we know it to-day."
Balzac explains this seeming aversion to the marriage state _as we know it
to-day_, in his two books, written during his early thirties, namely, Louis
Lambert and Seraphita. "Louis Lambert" is regarded as in the nature of an
autobiography, since Balzac, like his mouthpiece, Louis, viewed everything
from an inner sense--from intuition, or the soul faculties, rather than
from the standard of mere intellectual observation, analysis and synthesis.
This inner sense, so real and so thoroughly understandable to those
possessing it, is almost, if not quite, impossible of description to the
complete comprehension of those who have no intimate relationship with this
inner vision. To the person who views life from the inner sense, the soul
sense (which is the approach to, and is included in, cosmic consciousness),
the external or physical life is like a mirror reflecting, more or less
inaccurately, the reality--the soul is the gazer, and the visible life is
what he sees.
Balzac expresses this view in all he says and does. "All we are is in the
soul," he says, and the perfection or the imperfection of what we
externalize, depends upon the development of the soul.
It is this marvelously developed inner vision that makes marriage, on the
sense-conscious plane, which is the plane upon which we know marriage as it
is to-day, objectionable to Balzac.
His spirit had already united with its spiritual counterpart, and his soul
sought the embodiment of that union in the flesh. This he did not find in
the perfection and completeness which from his inner view he knew to exist.
Barriers of caste, or class; of time and space; of age; of race and color;
of condition; may intervene between counterparts on the physical plane;
nay, one may be manifesting in the physical body and the other have
abandoned the body, but as there is neither time nor space nor condition to
the spirit, this union may have been sought and found, and _reflected to_
the mortal consciousness, in which case marriage with anything less than
the _one_ true counterpart would be unsatisfactory, if not altogether
objectionable.
With this view in mind, Seraphita becomes as lucid a bit of reading as
anything to be found in literature.
Seraphita is the perfected being--the god into which man is developing, or
more properly speaking, _unfolding_, since man must unfold into that from
which he started, but with consciousness added.
Everywhere, in ancient and modern mysticism, we find the assumption that
God is dual--male and female. The old Hebrew word for God is
plural--Elohim.
Humankind invariably and persistently, even though half-mockingly, alludes
to man and wife as "one"; and men and women speak of each other, when
married, as "my other half."
That which persists has a basis in fact, and symbolizes the perfect type.
What we know of marriage as it is to-day, proves to us beyond the shadow of
a doubt, that the man-made institution of marriage does not make man and
woman one, nor insure that two halves of the same whole are united. The
highest type of men and women to-day are at best but half-gods, but these
are prophecies of the future race, "the man-god whom we await" as Emerson
puts it. But that which we await is the man-woman-god, the Perfected Being,
of whom Balzac writes in Seraphita.
It has been said that Madame Hanska, whom the author finally married only
six months previous to his death, was the original of Seraphita, but it
would seem that this great affection, tender and enduring as it was,
partook far more of a beautiful friendship between two souls who knew and
understood each other's needs, than it did of that blissful and ecstatic
union of counterparts, which everywhere is described by those who have
experienced it, as a sensation of _melting or merging into_ the other's
being.
Seraphita is the embodiment, in human form, of the _idea_ expressed in the
world-old belief in a perfected being; whose perfection was complete when
the two halves of the _one_ should have found each other.
The inference is very generally made that Balzac believed in and sought to
express the idea of a bi-sexual individual--a _personality_ who is complete
in himself or herself _as a person_; one in which the intuitive, feminine
principle and the reasoning, masculine principle had become perfectly
balanced--in short, an androgynous human.
This idea is apparently further substantiated by the fact that Seraphita
was loved by Minna, a beautiful young girl to whom Seraphita was always
Seraphitus, an ideal lover; and by Wilfrid, to whom Seraphita represented
his ideal of feminine loveliness, both in mind and body; a young girl
possessing marvelous, almost miraculous, wisdom, but yet a woman with
human passions and human virtues--his ideal of wifehood and motherhood.
But whatever the idea that Balzac intended to convey, whether, as is
generally believed, Seraphita was an androgynous being, or whether she
symbolized the perfection of soul-union, our contention is that this union
is not a creation of the imagination, but the accomplishment of the plan of
creation--the final goal of earthly pilgrimage; the raison d'etre of love
itself.
One argument against the idea that Seraphita was intended to illustrate an
androgynous being, rather than a perfected human, who had her spiritual
mate, is found in the words in which she refused to marry Wilfrid, although
Balzac makes it plainly evident that she was attracted to Wilfrid with a
degree of sense-attraction, due to the fact that she was still living
within the environment of the physical, and therefore subject to the
illusions of the mortal, even while her spiritual consciousness was so
fully developed as to enable her to perceive and realize the difference
between an attraction that was based largely upon sense, and that which was
of the soul.
Wilfrid says to her:
"Have you no soul that you are not seduced by the prospect of consoling a
great man, who will sacrifice all to live with you in a little house by the
border of a lake?"
"But," answers Seraphita, "I am loved with a love without bounds."
And when Wilfrid with insane anger and jealousy asked who it was whom
Seraphita loved and who loved her, she answered "God."
At another time, when Minna, to whom she had often spoken in veiled terms
of a mysterious being who loved her and whom she loved, asked her who this
person was, she answered:
"I can love nothing here on earth."
"What dost thou love then?" asked Minna.
"Heaven" was the reply.
This obscurity and uncertainty as to what manner of love it was that
absorbed Seraphita, and who was the object of it, could not have been
possible had it been the usual devotion of the _religeuse_.
Seraphita, whose consciousness extended far beyond that of the people about
her, could not have explained to her friends that the invisible realms were
as real to her as the visible universe was to those with only
sense-consciousness. It was impossible to explain to them that she had
found and knew her mate, even though she had not met him in the physical
body.
To Wilfrid she said she loved "God." To Minna she used the term "Heaven,"
and when Minna questioned: "But art thou worthy of heaven when thou
despisest the creatures of God?" Seraphita answered:
"Couldst thou love two beings at once? Would a lover be a lover if he did
not fill the heart? Should he not be the first, the last, the only one? She
who loves will she not quit the world for her lover? Her entire family
becomes a memory; she has no longer a relative. The lover! she has given
him her whole soul. If she has kept a fraction of it, she does not love. To
love feebly, is that to love? The word of the lover makes all her joy, and
quivers in her veins like a purple deeper than blood; his glance is a light
which penetrates her; she dissolves in him; there, where he is, all is
beautiful; he is warmth to the soul: he irradiates everything; near him
could one know cold or night? He is never absent; he is ever within us; we
think in him, to him, for him. Minna, that is the-way I love."
And when Minna, like Wilfrid, "seized by a devouring jealousy," demanded to
know "whom?" Seraphita answered, "God." This she did because the one whom
she loved became her God. We are told that "love makes gods of men."
Perfect love, the love of those who are spiritual-mates--soul-mates--the
"man-woman-god whom we await," becomes an immortal: and immortals are gods.
Moreover if Seraphita had intended to teach the love of the religious
devotee to The Absolute instead of a perfected sex-love, she would not have
pointed out to both Wilfrid and Minna that which she, in her superior
vision, her supra-consciousness, perceived, namely, that Wilfrid and Minna
were really intended for spiritual mates, and that what they each saw in
her was really a prophecy of their own perfected and spiritualized love.
The subject is one that is positively incomprehensible and unexplainable to
the average mind. All mystic literature, when read with the eyes of
understanding, exalts and spiritualizes sex. The latter day degeneration of
sex is the "trail of the serpent," which Woman is to crush with her heel.
And Woman is crushing it to-day, although to the superficial observer, who
sees only surface conditions, it would appear as though Woman had fallen
from her high estate, to take her place on a footing with man. This view is
the exoteric, and not the esoteric, one.
They who have ears hear the inner voice, and they who have eyes see with
the inner sight. The mystery of sex is the eternal mystery which each must
solve for himself before he can comprehend it, and when solved eliminates
all sense of sin and shame; brings Illumination in which everything is made
clear and makes man-woman immortal--_a_ god.
Swedenborg's theory of Heaven as a never-ending honeymoon in which
spiritually-mated humans dwell, has been denounced by many as "shocking" to
a refined and sensitive mind. But this idea is shocking only because even
the most advanced minds are seldom Illumined, their advancement being along
the lines of intellectual research and _acquired knowledge_, which, as we
have previously explained, is not synonymous with _interior wisdom_.
The illumined mind is bound to find in the eternal and ever-present fact of
sex, the key to the mysteries--the password to immortal godhood.
The subject is one that cannot be set forth in printed words; this fact is,
indeed, the very Plan of Illumination. It cannot be _taught_. It must be
_found_. Only those who have glimpsed its truth can even imperfectly point
the way in which it _may_ be discovered. No teacher can guarantee it. It is
the most evanescent, the most delicate, the most indescribable thing in the
Cosmos. It is therefore the most readily misinterpreted and misunderstood.
Balzac doubtless understood, not as a matter of perception of a truth but
as an experience, and this fact, if no other, marks him as one having a
very high degree of cosmic consciousness.
Seraphita called herself a "Specialist." When Minna inquired how it was
that Seraphitus could read the souls of men, the answer was:
"I have the gift of Specialism. Specialism is an inward sight that can
penetrate all things; you will understand its full meaning only through
comparison. In the great cities of Europe works are produced by which the
human hand seeks to represent the effects of the moral nature as well as
those of the physical nature, as well as those of the ideas in marble. The
sculptor acts on the stone; he fashions it; he puts a realm of ideas into
it. There are statues which the hand of man has endowed with the faculty of
representing the whole noble side of humanity, or the evil side of it; most
men see in such marbles a human figure and nothing more; a few older men, a
little higher in the scale of being, perceive a fraction of the thoughts
expressed in the statue; but the Initiates in the secrets of art are of the
same intellect as the sculptor; they see in his work the whole universe of
thought. Such persons are in themselves the principles of art; they bear
within them a mirror which reflects nature in her slightest manifestations.
Well, so it is with me; I have within me a mirror before which the moral
nature, with its causes and its effects, appears and is reflected. Entering
thus into the consciousness of others I am able to divine both the future
and the past * * * though what I have said does not define the gift of
Specialism, for to conceive the nature of that gift we must possess it."
This describes in terms similar to those employed by others who possess
cosmic consciousness, the results of this inner light, which Seraphita
calls a "mirror."
And yet, with this seemingly exhaustive and lucid exposition of the effects
of Illumination, Seraphita declares that "to conceive the nature of this
gift we must possess it."
Balzac further comments upon what he terms this gift of Specialism, which
is cosmic consciousness or illumination, thus:
"The specialist is necessarily the loftiest expression of man--the link
which connects the visible to the superior worlds. He acts, he sees, he
feels through his _inner being_. The abstractive _thinks_. The instinctive
simply _acts_. Hence three degrees for man. As an instinctive he is below
the level; as an abstractive he attains it; as a specialist he rises above
it. Specialism opens to man his true career; the Infinite dawns upon
him--he catches a glimpse of his destiny."
The merely sense-conscious man is the man-animal; the abstractive man is
the average man and woman in the world to-day--the human who is evolving
out of the mental into the spiritual consciousness. The specialist is the
cosmic conscious one, the one who "catches a glimpse of his destiny."
Balzac, in company with all who attain cosmic consciousness, had a great
capacity for suffering; and this soul-loneliness became crystalized into
spiritual wisdom, which he expressed in the words and in the manner most
likely to be accepted by the world.
How else can that divine union to which we are heirs and for which we are
either blindly, consciously, or supra-consciously, striving, be described
and exploited without danger of defilement and degeneracy, save and except
by the phrase "unity with God"?
All mystics have found it necessary to veil the "secret of secrets," lest
the unworthy (because _unready_) defile it with his gaze, even as the
sinful devotee prostrates himself hiding his face, while the priest raises
the chalice containing the holy eucharist in the ceremony of the mass.