Dr. Bucke later published an article in a current magazine, illustrating the illumination of his friend Walt Whitman, and supplemented with an account of his own experience.  We quote briefly from Dr. Bucke’s account of his own experience: 

“I had spent the evening in a great city with some friends reading and discussing poetry and philosophy.  We had occupied ourselves with Wordsworth, Shelley, Browning, and especially Whitman.  We parted at midnight.  I had a long drive in a hansom to my lodgings.  My mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images and emotions called up by the reading and talk, was calm and peaceful.  I was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actually thinking, but letting ideas, images and emotions flow of themselves, as it were, through my mind.  All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud.  For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city.  The next moment I knew that the fire was within myself.”

While Dr. Bucke is unquestionably right in his estimate of the fact that “a new race is being born,” as he expresses it, there can scarcely be any question of individual age, in which the new consciousness may be expected.  Physical maturity can have nothing whatever to do with the matter, since the acquisition of supra-consciousness is a matter of the maturity of the soul.  This completement of the cycle of the soul’s pilgrimage and service, may come at any age, as far as the physical body is concerned.  Indeed, science records no definite age at which even physical maturity is invariably reached, although there is an approximate age.

A case recently widely commented upon was that of a child of six years who showed every symptom of senility or old age, which could hardly be possible without having passed what we call “maturity.”

Again, we find that some persons retain every indication of youth, both of mind and body, long after their contemporaries have reached and passed middle age.  It is coming more and more to be admitted that age is relative, and that what we know as the relative is the effect of mental operations.  Mental operations are subject to change—­to enlargement.

The advent of cosmic consciousness is, therefore, not subject to what we know as time, as applied to physical development.

Nor should we speak of cosmic consciousness as an acquisition, but rather as a realization, since the consciousness is, at all times.  It always has been, it will always be.  Our relation to it changes, as we develop from the sense conscious to the self-conscious state and finally to what we term the “cosmic” conscious state.  This latter must of necessity have been as yet only imperfectly realized, even by those of the Illuminati, who are known to the world as avatars and saviours.

Several instances of the possession of cosmic consciousness by children, are personally known to the writer.  A well-known woman writer in America thus describes a succession of experiences in what were evidently conditions of cosmic consciousness, although as she said, she did not until many years later realize what had taken place.