Cosmic Consciousness vs Self Consciousness
this reminds me of the distinction Savitri Devi made between ‘life-centered’ and ‘man-centered’ creeds, and my suspicion that Christianity appeals to the selfish ego…
“Thus he comes to fear and to despise his body, with its hunger for food and its need of sex, and he resists it and calls it evil, and tries to whip it into obedience to his spirit, which he calls good. And this division in himself is reflected in, and writes itself large all over, his view of the universe. The cleft in himself yawns apart in the conceptions of heaven and hell, and God and Devil. And man finds himself the victim on a rack that, in reality, is framed of his own misconceptions, and drawn and quartered by powers of his own creating. All his life he flees what he fears, and seeks to embrace what he loves—but he never fully escapes the one or overtakes the other. All his days are full of strain, guilt, frustration, and disillusion. There is no peace anywhere.
But the mark of cosmic consciousness, in contrast with self-consciousness, the mark of the seer’s and Jesus’ order of consciousness, is oneness, wholeness, and with this, peace, heightened capabilities, and joy.
Suddenly, and usually after a long period of desperate struggle has left a man in a seemingly dark blind impasse, the new consciousness supervenes. Suddenly, in an instant, the whole universe takes on a different aspect. The old sense of division is gone. The old exhausting struggle with one’s God, against one’s God, is no more. There is no longer the least vestige of resistance. One fears nothing. One feels there is nothing in all the universe to be afraid of. And at last there is only one will. Call it your own will—the impulse that emanates from the very core of your being, or call it your God: perhaps the names make little or no difference. He wills what you will; you will what he wills. There is now only one will. There is now only one life. “I and my Father are one.” The last partition has gone down. There is no longer a body and a soul glaring at each other across the abyss in one’s soul. Body and soul have known—the great marriage. They are clasped in each other’s arms. Body is the soul made manifest. Soul is the body’s exhalation and exaltation. They are not twain but one—a psychophysical unity, the same thing looked at from different levels, different aspects of what is really only one life. The man has become a living whole.And the gaze through which he looks out upon the world about him, upon the people in it and all the starry universe, is the gaze of his own wholeness. No more is it double, as from seeing with two eyes, two different eyes, but it is become single—at last, single and crystal clear.
And wherever he looks, the universe is become as whole as he, and he one with it. No more does it seem to him an alien, hostile, and monstrous thing—a deadly corral, in which he has been trapped, in which an invisible marksman picks off his victims, each in his turn, from whose deadly aim none can escape, the universe a deathtrap from which none shall get out alive, not one. Suddenly it is as if he awoke from a nightmare, and the universe, instead of being a deathtrap, is become a beautiful home, which a most loving father has made festive for the return of his long-lost son, which the bridegroom has prepared for the home-coming of his long-loved long-wooed bride. It is a place one can be unafraid in, relax in, feel at home in. All sense of sin and guilt is gone, and all fear and tension. Instead there is peace, the peace which, in all soberness, the world cannot give (for it does not depend on anything the world has to offer), and which the world cannot take away (for there is nothing the world can take way that touches the source of it). Instead there is deep uncontainable joy. And this makes all life look different.”
-Willian Gayley Simpson “Which Way Western Man?”