This absence of consciousness of evil is in no wise synonymous with a type of person who exalts his undeveloped animal tendencies under the guise of liberation from a sense of sin.  Neither is this discrimination easy of attainment to any but those who realize in their own hearts the very distinct difference between the nothingness of sin and the pretended acceptance of perversions as purity.

While we are on this point we must again emphasize the truth that cosmic consciousness cannot be gained by prescription; there is no royal road to mukti.  Liberation from the lower manas can not be bought or sold, it can not be explained or comprehended, save by those to whom the attainment of such a state is at least possible if not probable.

Illustrative of his sense of unity with all life (one of the most salient characteristics of the fully cosmic conscious man), are these lines of Whitman’s: 

  “Voyaging to every port, to dicker and adventure;
  Hurrying with the modern crowd, as eager and fickle as any;
  Hot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him;
  Solitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me a long
      while;
  Walking the hills of Judea, with the beautiful gentle God by my side;
  Speeding through space—­speeding through Heaven and the stars.”

Oriental mysticism tells us that one of the attributes of the liberated one is the power to read the hearts and souls of all men; to feel what they feel; and to so unite with them in consciousness that we are for the time being the very person or thing we contemplate.  If this be indeed the test of godhood, Whitman expresses it in every line: 

  “The disdain and calmness of olden martyrs;
  The mother condemned for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children
      gazing on;
  The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing,
      covered with sweat;
  The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck—­the murderous
      buckshot and the bullets;
  All these I feel, or am.”

Seeking to express the sense of knowing and especially of feeling, and the bigness and broadness of life, the scorn of petty aims and strife; in short, that interior perception which Illumination brings, he says: 

  “Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? have you reckoned the earth
      much? 
  Have you practised so long to learn to read? 
  Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? 
  Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all
      poems;
  You shall possess the good of the earth and sun—­there are millions of
      suns left;
  You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through
      the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books;
  You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me;
  You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from yourself. 
  I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and
      the end;
  But I do not talk of the beginning nor the end.