Cosmic Consciousness by Richard M. Bucke

Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, by Richard Maurice Bucke. E. P.Dutton and Company, Inc., New York. 14th edition, 1948. Very good book in good dustjacket, which is tanned with a quarter-inch chip across the top of the spine. Price clipped. The blue cloth cover has minor wear. The interior is clean and unmarked.

Tara Mata, who edited Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, wrote an article titled “A Forerunner of the New Race” (now a How-to-Live booklet published by Self-Realization Fellowship), in which she quotes from Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness and describes in third person her experience of a prolonged, higher state of consciousness. Her words about this book: “Bucke’s theory is that, just as man advanced from the state of simple consciousness…into a state of self-consciousness…and marked by the development of language, so he must inevitably come into a higher state of consciousness, distinguished by a cosmic or universal understanding. Bucke maintains that the increasing number of people who have attained some degree of Cosmic Consciousness in the past few centuries is proof that these persons constitute the vanguard or forerunners of the new race.” Bucke writes about dozens of people who have experienced cosmic consciousness or at least some degree of superconsciousness, including philosophers and founders of major religions, writers such as Wordsworth, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, and Edward Carpenter, and the great saint Ramakrishna Paramahansa.