“Cosmic Consciousness”

 “Cosmic consciousness”. Is there any phrase more taboo, more unspeakable in philosophy, than this? Nowadays, to speak of cosmic consciousness is to invite ridicule. Here’s an example from a recent blog post, relating an anecdote told of the early pioneer of Sanskrit computational linguistics, Pandit Lakshimtatacharya: 

[1] Dominik Wujastyk, Indology blog, May 15, 2021 <https://www.mail-archive.com/ indology@list.indology.info/msg00098.html>

My first encounter with Pt. Lakshimtatacharya was in Bangalore in about 1994, when we both attended a talk about libraries and manuscripts. After a speaker gave a somewhat inflated talk, starting with manuscripts and ending with samādhi and cosmic consciousness, a tall, imposing and very orthodox-looking Brāhmaṇa rose in the audience and said, "Yes, it may well be as you say. But how are you able to distinguish what you have just described from a random, subjective neurological event?" My jaw fell open. It was obviously friendship from that moment on. [1]

[2] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: The Modern Library, 1902), pp. 389-90.

[3] Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (Philadelphia: Innes & Sons, 1901), pp. 2-3.

[4] Ibid, pp. 9-10.

It was not always thus. William James, the illustrious Harvard philosopher, felt no shame in speaking of cosmic consciousness. In The Varieties of Religious Experience he wrote with praise of “a highly interesting volume” by the “Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. R. M. Bucke, [who] gives to the more distinctly characterized of these phenomena the name of cosmic consciousness” [2]. James is speaking about Richard Maurice Bucke (1837– 1902), at one time head of the Asylum for the Insane in London, Ontario, who did indeed write a book entitled Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. Published in 1901, it sought to establish the reality of cosmic consciousness, which Bucke defines as “a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary man [... one whose...] prime characteristic [...] is, as its name implies, a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe” [3]. The book describes a diverse list of historical individuals who have experienced the phenomenon in question. Bucke would later reminisce that he “wrote a book in which he sought to embody the teaching of the illumination”, and, alluding to William James, that “some who read it thought very highly of it...” [4].

[5] Edward Carpenter, My Days and Dreams: Being Autobiographical Notes (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1916), pp. 250-3.

And yet, while his eponymous work did much to popularise it, it wasn’t Bucke who coined the phrase “cosmic consciousness”. Its inventor was the remarkable Englishman Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), a socialist, philosopher, and prescient activist for gay rights and prison reform. As a junior fellow of Trinity Hall Cambridge in 1880 or 1881, Carpenter had already befriended Ponnambalam Arunachalam (1853–1924), who would later become an illustrious Sri Lankan Tamil lawyer and receive a knighthood for his work in the Sri Lankan civil service. Arunachalam gave the impressionable Carpenter a copy of the Bhagavad-gītā, and a decade later invited him to visit India and Sri Lanka [5]. Carpenter would later publish a selection of letters he received from Arunachalam as Light From the East: Being Letters on Gñānam the Divine Knowledge by P. Arunachalam (1927). Carpenter documented the formative trip in a travelogue entitled From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta: Sketches in Ceylon and India (1892), and again in his autobiography, My Days and Dreams (1916). While Carpenter’s descriptions of his travels reveal him to be a deeply humane and sympathetic observer, often shocked and appalled by the abusive behaviour and attitudes of the British in India, the most important event for us, and the principal reason for his visit, were the two months he spent in Colombo sitting at the feet of an Indian sage and disciple of Tilleinathan Swami, Ramaswami. Carpenter mostly refers to him simply as “Gñāni”, the savant. What Carpenter learns from Ramaswami is that what human beings seek

[6] Edward Carpenter, From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta: Sketches in Ceylon and India (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1892), p. 154.

is a new order of consciousness – to which for want of a better we may give the name universal or cosmic consciousness, in contradistinction to the individual or special bodily consciousness with which we are all familiar. [6]

[7] Ibid.

With admirable honesty, Carpenter admits:

I am not aware that the exact equivalent of this expression “universal consciousness” is used in the Hindu philosophy; but the Sat-Chit-ānanda Brahm to which every yogi aspires indicates the same idea: sat, the reality, the all pervading; chit, the knowing, perceiving; ānanda, the blissful — all these united in one manifestation of Brahm. [7]

So the phrase “cosmic consciousness”, as Carpenter introduces it, designates a “new order” of consciousness, corresponding in intent with the Hindu conception of Brahman as bliss. Carpenter would later offer jñāna-ākāśa as a suitable Sanskrit equivalent, and, indeed, Ramaswami is explaining to Carpenter the rudiments of Advaita Vedānta when he goes on to clarify that 

[8] Ibid, pp.159, 188.

the true quality of the soul [...] is that of space, by which it is at rest, everywhere. But this space (Akása) [ākāśa] within the soul is far above the ordinary material space. The whole of the latter, including all the suns and stars, appears to you then, as it were, but an atom of the former [...so that...] this consciousness of space—not the material space, but the space within the soul—is a form of the supreme consciousness in man, the sat-chit-ānanda Brahm—Freedom, Equality, Extension, Omnipresence—and is accompanied by a sense which has been often described as a combination of all the senses—sight, hearing, touch, etc.—in one. [8]

[9] Ibid, p.143.

[10] Ibid, p. 155.

The sense in which consciousness is cosmic, then, is that it carries a universalising phenomenology, that to be in such a state is to have a sense of all-encompassing spaciousness. This is, as Carpenter says in his autobiography, “the intense consciousness (not conviction merely) of the oneness of all life” [9]. Carpenter does not suggest the alternative reading whereby “cosmic consciousness” refers to the idea that the cosmos itself is conscious. The phrase is exclusively associated with a plane of phenomenology in which “individual self and life thins away to a mere film, and are only the shadows cast by the glory revealed beyond” [10]. He formulates this in his introduction to his edition Arunachalam’s letters:

[11] 1927, p. 21.

gñana-akaśa [sic] is (as the very juxtaposition of the two words would seem to imply) [...] the knowledge which is space. It is the identification of space with consciousness. It is the medium within which Thought may indeed move, but which far surpasses all Thought and imagination in the width and swiftness of its embrace. [11]

Carpenter claims – and I find this to be the most extraordinary part of the whole story – that his encounter with Ramaswami is the stimulus for his defence of democracy. Already in his travelogue he writes: 

[12] Carpenter, From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta, pp. 160-1.

This was one of the most remarkable parts of the Guru’s teaching. Though (for family reasons) maintaining many of the observances of Caste himself, and though holding and teaching that for the mass of the people caste rules were quite necessary, he never ceased to insist that when the time came for a man (or woman) to be "emancipated" all these rules must drop aside as of no importance — all distinction of castes, classes, all sense of superiority or self-goodness — of right and wrong even — and the most absolute sense of Equality must prevail towards every one [sic], and determination in its expression. Certainly it was remarkable (though I knew that the sacred books contained it) to find this germinal principle of Western democracy so vividly active and at work deep down beneath the innumerable layers of Oriental social life and custom. But so it is; and nothing shows better the relation between the West and the East than this fact. This sense of Equality, of Freedom from regulations and confinements, of Inclusiveness, and of the Life that "rests everywhere," belongs of course more to the cosmic or universal part of man than to the individual part. To the latter it is always a stumbling-block and an offence. It is easy to show that men are not equal, that they cannot be free, and to point the absurdity of a life that is indifferent and at rest under all conditions. Nevertheless to the larger consciousness these are basic facts, which underlie the common life of humanity, and feed the very individual that denies them. Thus repeating the proviso that in using such terms as cosmic and universal consciousness we do not commit ourselves to the theory that the instant a man leaves the personal part of him he enters into absolutely unlimited and universal knowledge, but only into a higher order of perception — and admitting the intricacy and complexity of the region so roughly denoted by these terms, and the microscopical character of our knowledge about it — we may say once more, also as a roughest generalisation, that the quest of the East has been this universal consciousness, and that of the West the personal or individual consciousness. [12]

The argument from cosmic consciousness to democracy as contained in this passage seems to be this: there is a “higher order of perception” in which differences between individuals are not phenomenologically manifest. To such a state of consciousness, all people are equal because no inequality is apparent. 

We can learn through Carpenter’s Whitmanesque 1883 poetry collection Towards Democracy that he was known to Aurobindo, Gandhi and Tagore. Carpenter explains his motivation in an essay for the newspaper The Labour Prophet. He describes how in the lead-up to writing Towards Democracy, he 

[13] Edward Carpenter, “Towards democracy” in The Labour Prophet, May 1894, pp. 49-51.

became for the first time overwhelmingly conscious of the disclosure within me of a region transcending in some sense the ordinary bounds of personality, in the light of which region my own idiosyncrasies of character—defects, accomplishments, limitations, or what not– appeared of no importance whatever—an absolute freedom from mortality, accompanied by an indestructible calm and joy. I immediately saw, or felt, that this region of self existing in me existed equally (though not always equally consciously) in others. In regard to it the mere diversities of temperament which ordinarily distinguish and divide people dropped away and became indifferent, and a field was opened in which all might meet, in which all were truly equal. Thus the two words which controlled my thought and expression at that time became Freedom and Equality. [13]

[14] Edward Carpenter, Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1889), p. 52.

Cosmic consciousness has become a sense of our common humanity. In Civilization: Its Cause and Cure, Carpenter speaks of “the delusion that man can exist for himself alone—his outer and, as it were, accidental self apart from the great inner and cosmical self by which he is one with his fellows” [14]. On his use of the authorial first-person, Carpenter comments:

[15] Carpenter, “Towards democracy”.

It seems to me more and more clear that the word “I” has a practically infinite range of meaning—that the ego covers far more ground than we usually suppose. At some points we are intensely individual, at others intensely sympathetic; some of our impressions (as the tickling of a hair) are of the most momentary character, others (as the sense of identity) involve long periods of time. Sometimes we are aware of almost a fusion between our own identity and that of another person. What does all this mean? Are we really separate individuals, or is individuality an illusion, or, again, is it only a part of the ego or soul that is individual and not the whole? [...] Anyhow, what am I? [15]

Bucke devoted a chapter in his celebrated book to Carpenter. There, he quotes in full the section from Adam’s Peak in which Carpenter coins the phrase “cosmic consciousness” and identifies it with Brahman. For Bucke, in Towards Democracy, it is the voice of the Cosmic Sense which is itself speaking: 

[16] Edward Carpenter, Towards Democracy (Manchester: John Heywood, 1883), p. 343. [Part 1; 3 more parts in subsequent years]

So I am the space within the soul, of which the space without is but the similitude and mental image; / Comest thou to inhabit me, thou hast the entrance to all life—death shall no longer divide thee from whom thou lovest. [16]

According to Carpenter, then, there is a region, field or space (Skt. ākāśa) within human subjectivity and self-awareness in which individual personality is transcended, meaning that differences of individual character are felt as insignificant and the separateness between individuals is felt to be an artefact. This region, accessible by everybody, grounds a sense of our common humanity and our equality. Carpenter finds this idea in the teachings of Ramaswami and in the poems of Walt Whitman, widely known to be influenced by his readings of Hindu scripture. 

Let me sum up what we have learned from our brief history of the phrase “cosmic consciousness”. We have discovered that this phrase serves as a stand-in for the doctrine we might call Psychological Monism. Psychological Monism is the phenomenological thesis that there is a mode of consciousness in which everything is experienced as being one with everything else, and that this mode of consciousness (of the cosmos as a single whole) can serve to provide prima facie justification for a range of egalitarian and cosmopolitan beliefs, such as the belief that all people, as members of a common humanity, are equal. Psychological Monism belongs to a type of theory in which experience supplies prima facie justification for belief: just as my perceptual experience of a table before me justifies, in the absence of defeaters, my belief that there is a table here, so too my cosmic experience, my experience as of the cosmos being a single whole, justifies my belief in the equal standing of all humanity. 

The idea that the universal consciousness of Advaita Vedānta should lead to a common fellowship among humankind would find a vociferous advocate in Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. His inaugural lecture on assuming the Spalding Chair in Eastern Religions and Ethics, entitled The World’s Unborn Soul and delivered at Oxford University in October 1936, is exemplary. Radhakrishnan begins by pointing out that the world of 1936 is in a state of crisis, one (much like today) of fragmented nationalism. Every civilization, he claims, is an experiment in living. But the European experiment has reached a dead-end, its only hope of salvation lying with an infusion of ideas from India. As he puts it, it would be “an academic error, a failure of perspective” for Europeans not to listen to sources of inspiration found in the world’s literature:

[17] Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, The World’s Unborn Soul, Spalding Professorship Inaugural Lecture (Oxford, 20 October 1936), p.1.

Perhaps, the civilizations of the East, their religions and ethics, may offer us some help in negotiating difficulties we are up against [...] Now that we have the whole world for our cultural base, the process of discovery and training in classics cannot cease with listening to the voices of Isaiah and Paul, Socrates and Cicero. [17]

Humankind, Radhakrishnan says, is still in the making. It has the potential for universal fellowship, a common humanity based on a shared form of subjectivity. And this is, famously, Radhakrishnan’s fundamental idea: that there is a common, universal core in the subjective character of all human experience, a commonality that represents the best of us and upon which a universal feeling of camaraderie can be based. His is a conception of authenticity based on rediscovery of this basal core of universal subjectivity:

[18] Ibid, p.26; my italics.

The aim of all human living is self-definition. It is to isolate the substantial permanence which each finite life possesses deep down, from the strife of empirical happenings. We can exceed the limits within which human consciousness normally functions. Man can abstract from his body and flesh, from his feelings and desires, even from thoughts which rise like waves on the surface of his mind, and reach a pure awareness, the naked condition of his pure selfhood. [18]

And Radhakrishnan questions:

[19] Ibid, p. 24.

What is our true self? While our bodily organization undergoes changes, while our thoughts gather like clouds in the sky and disperse again, the self is never lost. It is present in all, yet distinct from all. Its nature is not affected by ordinary happenings. It is the source of the sense of identity through numerous transformations. It remains itself though it sees all things [...] This persisting self which is universal seer to all things seen, this essential awareness which nothing has the power to suppress... [19]

A self that is never lost, independent of the vagaries of our physiological and psychological constitution, an ever-present and unchanging source of self-awareness, represents, for Radhakrishnan, the ultimate ground of human fraternity. 

[20] Dhirendra Mohan Datta, “The contribution of modern Indian philosophy to world philosophy” in The Philosophical Review 57.6 (1948), pp. 550–72: p. 558.

Ironically, although “never lost”, this self, as the Upaniṣadic seers were the first to discover, is remarkably hard to find. The new philosophical principle that emerges in Radhakrishnan’s mind is that of intuition, “where intellect, will and emotion are fully integrated, and man is one with the spirit in him” [20]. Rediscovering this pure, universal self, the “authentic being” from which we have become “exiled”, is the solution we have been looking for, of how to live in our age of insularity. Radhakrishnan does not invoke the phrase “cosmic consciousness,” but the continuity between his ideas and those of Carpenter are evident:

[21] Radhakrishnan, p. 30.

The fundamental truths of a spiritual religion are that our real self is the supreme being, which it is our business to discover and consciously become, and this being is one in all. The soul that has found itself is no longer conscious of itself in its isolation. It is conscious rather of the universal life of which all individuals, races, and nations are specific articulations [....] Those who are anxious to live in peace with their own species and all life will not find it possible to gloat over the massacres of large numbers of men simply because they do not belong to their race or country [...] Our normal attitudes to other races and nations are no more than artificial masks, habits of thought and feeling, sedulously cultivated by long practice in dissimulation [...] Racialism and nationalism which require us to exercise our base passions, to bully and cheat, to kill and loot, all with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous and doing God’s work, are abhorrent to the spiritually awakened. For them all races and nations lie beneath the same arch of heaven. They proclaim a new social relationship and serve a new society with civil liberties for all individuals, and political freedom for all nations great and small. [21]

We may, of course, wonder how good the argument from cosmic consciousness to democracy ultimately is. The argument evidently presupposes both that cosmic consciousness is veridical and that the absence of perceived distinctions entails the absence of real distinctions. Democracy, however, surely requires that there is a plurality of numerically distinct individuals, whereas to cosmic consciousness neither numerical nor qualitative distinctness is apparent. On the face of it, the argument seems to be self-defeating. For it is a basic presupposition of any egalitarian belief that there is a plurality of distinct individual subjects, and yet this presupposition is inconsistent with the veridicality of the content of the cosmic experience which is meant to supply the belief with justification. For this reason, I am sceptical of Carpenter’s claim that cosmic consciousness provides democracy with political legitimacy, and of Radhakrishnan’s analogous claim for internationalism and cosmopolitanism. The defenders of such claims seem to feel that they need only establish the existence of cosmic consciousness for their conclusion to follow, but what worries me is that non-sequitur in the deduction. More importantly than such caveats, however, is how the story of this argument is entwined with the story of the 19th and 20th century reception of Śaṅkara’s monistic Advaita Vedānta in Europe, and with efforts in India to disentangle various strands within Hindu philosophical literature from their fusion in Śaṅkara’s monistic system. What our delve into its history has revealed is that the contemporary ridicule with which the phrase “cosmic consciousness” is met is quite unjustified: to the contrary, it has held a place of honour in important movements of democratic and internationalist social reform. 

Bibliography

Bucke, Richard Maurice. Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. Philadelphia: Innes & Sons, 1901.

Carpenter, Edward. Towards Democracy. Manchester: John Heywood, 1883. [Part 1; 3 more parts in subsequent years] 

Carpenter, Edward. Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1889. 

Carpenter, Edward. From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta: Sketches in Ceylon and India. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1892. 

Carpenter, Edward. “Towards democracy” in The Labour Prophet, May 1894, pp. 49-51. 

Carpenter, Edward. My Days and Dreams: Being Autobiographical Notes. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1916. 

Carpenter, Edward. “Introduction” in Light From the East: Being Letters on Gñānam the Divine Knowledge by Hon. P. Arunachalam. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1927, pp. 9-30. 

Datta, Dhirendra Mohan. “The contribution of modern Indian philosophy to world philosophy” in The Philosophical Review 57.6 (1948), pp. 550–72.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: The Modern Library, 1902. 

Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli. The World’s Unborn Soul. Spalding Professorship Inaugural Lecture. Oxford, 20 October 1936. 

Wujastyk, Dominik. Indology blog, May 15, 2021. https://www.mail-archive.com/ indology@list.indology.info/msg00098.html