“All mean egotism vanishes.  I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

Emerson’s powerful intellect would naturally describe such an experience in intellectual terms rather than, as in the instances heretofore recorded, in religious phraseology, but it must not be inferred that Emerson was less religious, in the true sense, than was Mohammed or St. Paul.

Emerson lived in an age when orthodoxy flourished, and he and his associates of the Transcendentalist cult, were regarded as non-religious, if not actually heretical.  Therefore, it is that Emerson’s keen intellect was brought to bear upon everything he encountered, not only in his own intimate experience but also in all that he read and heard, lest he be trapped into committing the error which he saw all about him, namely, of mistaking an accepted viewpoint as an article of actual faith.  His way to the Great Light lay through the jungle of the mind, but he found the path clear and plain and he left a torchlight along the way.

Emerson fully recognized the illusory character of external life, and the eternal verity of the soul, as witness: 

  “If the red slayer thinks he slays,
    Or if the slain thinks he is slain,
  They know not well, the subtle ways,
    I keep and pass and turn again.”

Horrible as is war, because of the spirit of hate and destruction it embodies and keeps alive, yet the fact remains that man in his soul knows that he can neither slay nor be slain by the mere act of destroying the physical shell called the body.  It is inconceivable that human beings would lend themselves to warfare, if they did not know, as a part of that area of supra-consciousness, that there is a something over which bullets have no power.

This fact, regarded as a more or less vague belief to the majority, becomes incontrovertible fact to the person who has entered cosmic consciousness.  His view is reversed, and where he formerly looked from the sense-conscious plane forward into a possible spiritual plane, he now gazes back over the path from the spiritual heights and sees the winding road that led upward to the elevation, much as a traveller on the mountain top looks back and for the first time sees all of the devious trail over which he has, climbed to his present vantage point.  During the journey there had been many times when he could only see the next step ahead, and nothing but his faith in the assurance of his fellow men who had attained the summit of that mountain, could ever have sustained him through the perils of the climb, but once on the heights, his backward view takes in the details of the journey and sees not “through a glass darkly,” but in the clear light of achievement.

Such is the effect of cosmic consciousness to the one who has seen the light.

“One of the benefits of a college education,” says Emerson, “is to show the boy its little avail.”