Read the Full Series • Immortality Unleashed
Mystics and philosophers of all traditions have tried in their way to describe the transcendent awareness that they experience during prayer, meditation, ritual, varied disciplines of a spiritual nature and what I might call spontaneous descents of grace. It has come to be labeled as cosmic consciousness and is regarded as the inevitable expansion of self consciousness on what we recognise as the inner journey.
As a long term experiencer of these subtle states and coach/cheerleader to others, I have repeatedly attempted to convey what even touching the fringes of cosmic consciousness can feel like: The temporary forgetting of body, mind and emotion as one swims in the generous tides of energy that waft the former you about like some leaf freed from its tree. Such can be felt as joyful, exciting or strangely serene. Perhaps only a one or two minute reprieve from the tasks, desires and anxieties of the day, when ego and agenda conveniently disappear, it can renew any dampened spirit and reset outlooks. The resurgence of mindfulness meditation classes and retreats have no doubt increased the culture’s familiarity with its pleasing release.
As one who has done somewhat more than dabbling in literary forms and expression over the decades, I felt the occasional urge to express such glimpses of cosmic consciousness in poetry. One attempt was –
“The Orange”
A perfect being,
Offering itself up
For my pleasure.
I peel and devour,
Gladly go
For a shower.
Flesh of my flesh,
Neither
Fate nor power.
Later I thought to explicate the perhaps mysterious implications of the brief utterance: “Sometimes in the course of a rather dispiriting rainy afternoon, it seems appropriate, if not quite necessary, to elaborate further on some of my more pithy utterances. Whether this rather adolescent desperation to feel that one has successfully communicated the contents of one’s vision through the medium of the written word proves to be any more than yet another elegant and fastidious futility remains to be seen, but in the apparent linear interim let me attempt to enchant and then channel your perhaps flagging curiosity.
I have, of course, just completed the consumption of a store bought orange. As I was chewing on its juicy entrails, I recalled the above quoted poem (from 1999’s “Flair, 40% Off”). My thoughts, as they have an annoying tendency to do, spread like wildfire, and I was compelled to seek refuge at the computer instead of stretching out on the couch for one of those serendipitous naps I have come to know so well.
In that small book there are several approaches to that exalted condition, experienced and expounded upon, at some length, by the turn-of-the-century doctor Richard Bucke, known now as Cosmic Consciousness, but perhaps The Orange best reflects the daily regimen of such a state. It is, of course, notoriously difficult to maintain such divine elevation. One’s neighbours and colleagues expect, and deserve, less. And if they do not ‘get it’, one quickly discovers there are special places and foods in most communities for such parboiled space cadets, not to mention the kindly faces who will take to your care like ducks to water.
When so viewed, the orange is, indeed, a perfect being, offering itself up for your pleasure, as is any organic gismo offered up by mother nature. Its self sacrifice, when plucked from twig and branch, is no more distant from your ken than the lowering of your cold flesh into the soil of our planetary mother. Stretching one’s consciousness in either or both directions can be an approach to the state Bucke defines as cosmic. Such conscious effort will perhaps only lead to an illumination of the intellect, but it softens the ground for a later spontaneous outpouring, which may embrace the entire being, the being that knows rather than the one who thinks.
To solemn vegetarians and vegans, who point to the callous disposal of cow, sheep and pig, I would suggest the analogy of desperate wailing in hospital ward and terminal bedroom, where the human, sunk in the seductive illusion of mortality, clings to form with all its might, while death, with all its extravagant denouements, kindly drags another unwilling victim through the doors of despair to the life of after.
There was a memoir in today’s paper which illustrates this analogy perfectly: “I can see dad shuffling along with his oxygen tank. Trapped in his body like a forest creature in the jaws of a bear trap tearing its legs off to be free. Like a seabird covered in oil flopping on the filthy beach. Like fish mottled with an unholy disease unable to escape the cloudy polluted waters.”
All of us, in this enigmatic and fantastic food chain, must learn to let go, let go of the identities so lovingly bestowed by family and community, for the myriad forms we take on in our passage through physicality, while being dumbfoundingly intricate biochemical systems remarkably well suited to their tasks and environments, are, in the end, only vehicles adapted to a present terrain, and when that terrain changes another vehicle is required.
Meanwhile the orange lies digesting in my stomach, flesh of my flesh, figure of the imagination, sight for the blind. I am neither the orchestrator of its fate nor the power behind its performance. That we share in measures according to or needs. I found it and it found me: together we shall journey to whatever the future brings. Do the insects in the garden know of the gardener’s intentions? No, they adapt to ever changing circumstances. A animate intelligence, both the telling and the told of the story, I peel and devour someone’s vision of a victim, then gladly go for a shower, a minor deity going for his stripes.
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