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 o