FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   140   141   142   143   144   145   146   147   148   149   150   151   152   153   154   155   156   157   158   159   160   161   162   163   164  
165   >>  
e-conscious, mortal life. Dante; the Brownings; Shelley; Swinbourne; Goethe; Milton; Keats; Rosetti; Shakespeare; Pope; Lowell--where should we stop, did we essay to draw a line? WORDSWORTH Wordsworth, the poet of Nature has given us in his own words, so clearly cut an outline of his Illumination, that we can not resist recording here the salient points which mark his experience as that of cosmic consciousness, transcending the more frequent phenomenon of soul-consciousness and its psychic functions. Wordsworth's Ode to immortality epitomizes the lesson of the Yoga sutras--out of The Absolute we come, and return to immortal bliss with consciousness added. Wordsworth also affords an excellent example of our contention that cosmic consciousness does not come to us at any specific age or time. Wordsworth distinctly says that as a child he possessed this faculty, as for example his oft-repeated words, both in conversation and in his biography: "Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death, as a state applicable to my own being. It was not so much from feelings of animal vivacity that my difficulty came, as from a sense of the indomitableness of the spirit within me. I used to brood over the stories of Enoch and Elijah, and almost to persuade myself that, whatever might become of others, I should be translated, in something of the same way, to heaven. With a feeling congenial to this, I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree, to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality." In later life, Wordsworth lost the realization of this supra-consciousness, in what a commentator calls a "fever of rationalism"; but the power of that wonderful spiritual vision, pronounced in his youth, could not be utterly lost and soon after he reached his thirtieth year, he again becomes the spiritual poet, fully conscious of his higher nature--the cosmic conscious self. WILLIAM SHARP--"FIONA MACLEOD" A pronounced instance of the two phases of consciousness, is that of the late William Sharp, one of the best known writers of the modern English school. It was not until after the death of William Sharp, that the secret of this dual personality was given to the public, althoug
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   140   141   142   143   144   145   146   147   148   149   150   151   152   153   154   155   156   157   158   159   160   161   162   163   164  
165   >>  



Top keywords:
consciousness
 

Wordsworth

 

cosmic

 

conscious

 

spiritual

 
pronounced
 
William
 

school

 
nature
 

external


Swinbourne

 

immaterial

 
Goethe
 

grasped

 
reality
 

Shelley

 
realization
 
idealism
 

inherent

 

recall


heaven

 

feeling

 

Rosetti

 

translated

 

Shakespeare

 

congenial

 

communed

 

existence

 

unable

 

things


Milton

 
mortal
 

phases

 

MACLEOD

 

instance

 
personality
 

public

 
althoug
 

secret

 
writers

modern
 

English

 
WILLIAM
 
Brownings
 

vision

 

wonderful

 
commentator
 

rationalism

 
utterly
 

higher