Bucke later records, as "cosmic consciousness,"
and yet the similarity of the experience, with the many which have been
recorded is almost startling.
The salient point in this account, as in most of the others which have
found their way into public print, is the feeling of being in perfect
harmony and union with everything in the universe. "I was everything and
everything was I," said this young man, and again "I was here, there and
everywhere at once," he says in an effort to describe something which in
the very nature of it, must be indescribable in terms of sense
consciousness.
Illustrative of the connection between religious ecstasy and cosmic
consciousness, we find the experience of an illiterate negro woman, a
celebrated religious and anti-slavery worker of the early part of the last
century.
This woman was known as "Sojourner Truth" and was at least forty years of
age in 1817, when she was given her freedom under a law which freed all
slaves in New York state, who had attained the age of forty years.
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