Potted Biography
Richard Maurice Bucke was born in 1837, the seventh child of English parents who emigrated to Canada a year later. Bucke grew up on a farm in Ontario with little formal schooling. At age 17, he travelled to the United States, worked at odd jobs, and finally hired himself our as a driver on a wagon train heading west across the plains. In the course of a disastrous mining venture Bucke lost one foot; he lost part of the other to frostbite. He returned to the East and put himself through McGill Medical School, won the prize for best thesis, and did postgraduate work in Europe. In 1864 he returned to Canada where he set up a practice in Sarnia, Ontario, married, and raised a family.Bucke's professional career was distinguished. He was appointed Superintendent of two asylums for the insane, in Hamilton and London, Ontario. He became one of the foremost "alienists", as psychiatrists were then called, on the continent. In 1882 he was made Professor of Mental and Nervous Diseases at Western University in London, Ontario; in 1888 he was elected President of the Psychological Section of the British Medical Association; and in 1890 he became President of the American Medico-Psychological Association.
In 1867, Bucke heard the poetry of Walt Whitman for the first time and was greatly affected. Bucke's first book, published in 1879, called Man's Moral Nature, an examination of the relationship between man's physical mind - the sympathetic nervous system - and his moral nature, was dedicated to Whitman.
Cosmic Consciousness, praised by William James and by P D Ouspensky, has become a classic. Bucke died in an accident a year after its publication.
"He was born of good middle class English stock and grew up almost without education on what was then a backwoods Canadian farm. As a child he assisted in such labour as lay within his power: tended cattle, horses, sheep, pigs; brought in firewood, worked in the hay field, drove oxen and horses, ran errands.
"His pleasures were as simple as his labours: an occasional visit to a neighbouring small town, a game of ball, bathing in the creek that ran through his father's farm, making and sailing mimic ships, searching for bird's eggs and flowers in the spring, and for wild fruits in the summer and fall, afforded him, with his skates and handsled in the winter, his homely, much loved recreations.
"While still a young boy he read with keen appreciation Marryat's novels, Scott's poems and novels, and other similar books dealing with outdoor nature and human life.
"He never, even as a child, accepted the doctrines of the Christian church; but, as soon as old enough to dwell at all on such themes, conceived that Jesus was a man - great and good, no doubt, but a man; that no one would ever be condemned to everlasting pain; that if a conscious God existed, He was the supreme Master and meant well in the end for all; but that, this life here being ended, it was doubtful if conscious identity would be preserved.
"The boy dwelt on those and similar themes far more than anyone would suppose, but probably not more than many other introspective small fellow mortals. He was subject at times to a sort of ecstasy of curiosity and hope. On one special occasion when about ten years old he earnestly hoped to die so that the secrets of the beyond, if there was any beyond, might be revealed to him. He experienced agonies of anxiety and terror when, for instance, at about the same age, he read Reynold's Faust. Being near its end one sunny afternoon, he laid it down utterly unable to continue reading, and went out into the sunshine to recover from the horror which had seized him.
"His mother died when he was only a few years old, and his father shortly afterwards. The outward circumstances of his life became more unhappy than can readily be told. At sixteen he left home to live and die as might happen. For five years he wandered over North America from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Upper Ohio to San Francisco. He worked on farms, on railways, on steamboats, and in the placer diggings of Western Nevada. Several times he nearly suffered shipwreck by sickness, starvation, freezing, and once, on the banks of the Humboldt River in Utah, fought for his life half a day with the Shoshone Indians.
"After five years' wandering, at the age of twenty-one he returned to the country fo his childhood. A moderate sum of money from his dead mother enabled him to spend some years in study, and his mind after lying so long fallow, absorbed ideas with extraordinary facility. He graduated with high honours four years after his return from the Pacific Coast.
"Outside of the collegiate course he read with avidity many speculative books such as The Origin of Species, Tyndall's Heat and Essays; Buckle's History, Essays and Reviews, and much poetry, especially such as seemed to him free and fearless. In this species of literature he soon preferred Shelley, and of his poems Adonais and Prometheus were his favourites.
"His like for some years was one passionate note of interrogation, an unappeasable hunger for enlightenment on the basic problems. Leaving college, he continued his search with the same ardour. He taught himself French so that he might read Auguste Comte, Hugo, and Renan; and German so that he might read Goethe, especially Faust.
"At the age of thirty he fell in with Leaves of Grass and at once saw that it contained, in greater measure than any book so far found, what he had so long been looking for. He read the Leaves eagerly, even passionately, but for several years derived little from them. At last light broke and there was revealed to him (as far, perhaps, as such things can be revealed) at least some of the meanings. Then occurred that to which the foregoing is a preface.
"It was in the early spring, at the beginning of his thirty-sixth year. He and two friends had spent the evening reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whitman. They parted at midnight, and he had a long drive in a hansom (it was in an English city). All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around, as it were, by a flame-coloured cloud. For an instant he thought of fire - some sudden conflagration in the great city. The next instant he knew that the light was within himself. Directly afterwards there came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness, accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning-flash of the Brahmic Splendour which ever since lightened his life. Upon his heart fell one drop of the Brahmic Bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an after-taste of heaven
"Among other things he did not come to believe: he saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living presence; that the soul of man is immortal; that the Universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world is what we calle love; and that the happiness of everyone is in the long run absolutely certain. He claims that he learned more within the few seconds that the illumination lasted than in previous months or years of study, and that he learned much that no study could ever have taught.
"The illumination itself continued not more than a few moments, but its effects proved ineffaceable. It was impossible for him ever to forget what he at that time saw and knew; neither did he or could he ever doubt the truth of what was then presented to his mind. There was no return of the experience at any other time.
"The supreme occurrence of that night was his real and sole initiation to the new and higher order of ideas. But it was only an initiation. He saw the light but had no more idea whence it came and what it meant than had the first creature that saw the light of the sun. Years afterwards he met C.P. of whom he had often heard as having extraordinary spiritual insight. He found that C.P. had entered the higher life of which he had a glimpse, and had large experience of its phenomena. His conversation with C.P. threw a flood of light upon the true meaning of what he had himself experienced.
"Looking round then upon the world of man, he saw the significance of the subjective light in the case of St Paul and in that of Mohammed. The secret of Whitman's transcendent greatness was revealed to him. Certain conversations with J.H.J. and with J.B. helped him not a little. Personal intercourse with Edward Carpenter, T.S.R., C.M.C., and M.C.L. assisted greatly in the broadening and clearing up of his speculations and in the extension and co-ordination of his thought.
"But much time and labour were still required before the germinal concept could be satisfactorily elaborated and matured. This is the idea that there exists living among and sprung from ordinary humanity an extraordinary family whose members are spread abroad throughout the advanced races of mankind and throughout the last forty centuries of the world's history.
"The trait that distinguishes these people from other men is that their spiritual eyes have been opened and they have seen. The better known members of this group who, were they collected together, could be accommodated in an ordinary drawing-room, have created all the modern religions and, speaking generally, have, through religion and literature, created modern civilisation. Not that they have contributed any large numerical proportion of the books which have been written, but that they have produced the few books which have inspired the larger number of all that have been written in modern times. These men dominate the last twenty-five, especially the last five, centuries as stars of the first magnitude dominate the midnight sky.
"A man is identified as a member of this family by the fact that at a certain age he has passed through a new birth and risen to a higher spiritual plane. The reality of the new birth is demonstrated by the subjective light and other phenomena. The object of the present volume is to teach others what little the writer himself has been able to learn of the spiritual status of this new race."
The Author writes of Himself