"Waking from sleep"...

RICHARD M. BUCKE

AND WALT WHITMAN



One of the western world's most highly developed mystics of recent times was the great American poet Walt Whitman, whose 'whispers of heavenly death' I've just referred to. In his book Cosmic Consciousness, Richard M. Bucke places Whitman alongside the Buddha, Jesus, Moses and others as one of the small number of man beings throughout history who have developed a permanent mystical consciousness. In fact, Bucke goes so far as to see Whitman the `highest instance of cosmic consciousness' because he was able integrate his mystical consciousness into his ordinary personality Without allowing it to completely take over and `tyrannize over the rest'.

Whitman was someone who was constantly awed by the wonder of life and always aware of the radiance and harmony of spirit-force pervading the world. He sensed that he was divine, that the whole world was divine and that there was no separateness between himself and other human beings, or himself and the world. As he writes in Song of Myself

Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.


Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch'd from...


I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,

In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass...']



Bucke felt able to make such high claims for Whitman because he was a friend of his - or perhaps `disciple' might he a better word - and had personally experienced the powerful radiance that he emanated. He first met Whitman in 1877, five years after his own experience of `cosmic consciousness' (as reported at the end of Chapter 1). Writing of himself in the third person, Bucke noted that he and Whitman only spent an hour together and that the poet `only spoke to him about a hundred words altogether, these quite ordinary and commonplace'. However, shortly afterwards a feeling of ecstasy filled him:



A state of mental exultation set in, which he could only describe by comparing to the slight intoxication by champagne, or to falling in love! And this exultation, he said, lasted at least six weeks in a clearly marked degree, so that, ,for at least that length blame, he was plainly different, from his ordinary self. Neither did it then, or since, pass away. Though it ceased to be felt as something new and strange, but became a permanent element in his life, a strong and living force.



Perhaps, you might argue, this was just the result of Bucke's admiration of Whitman's poetry, the kind of intoxication a fan of a pop singer feels when they meet them in person. But significantly, other people were aware of a kind of `radiance' or energy emanating from Whitman. The English author and poet Edward Carpenter visited him for the first time in 1877 and was immediately aware of a `certain radiant power in him, a large benign effluence and inclusiveness, as of the sun, which filled out the place where he was'.


Waking from Sleep
Steve Taylor
Published by Hay House
2010

p.154-6