Walt Whitman Was Here
Cosmic Consciousness
I believe a leaf of grass is no less the journey work of the stars.
Walt Whitman
Do you believe in ghosts?
Pull up a chair and allow me to tell you a story. On second thought some things go way beyond a story! When does a mere coincidence turn into a haunting? A rush of synchronicities that dance into the marrow of our bones and never leave us where they found us. Is there an energy that stays in the places that we have touched that act as a bridge for the dead to find us? I will let the hair on the back of your neck be the judge.
Let me set the scene for this evocative tale of truth. I had settled into some evening reading on a cold winter night. The darkness was smothering the last embers of light with the ashes of another day. That space where the shared imagination comes to knock on the door of the material world. It is time for me to set these words free.
I am a fervid reader of Maria Popova’s Marginalian. That evening I was leaning into her offering of her favourite books of 2022, and I came across her write up on John Higgs book, “William Blake versus the World”. I opened up her review and in typical Popova brilliance she took me on a journey. When reading Maria’s work I always get lost and then leave a changed person having taken an unexpected path through her links to a beautiful unfolding of my own self. On a journey down the wells that evening I ended up at Cosmic Consciousness and the Bucke and Whitman story that mysteriously unbeknownst had suddenly intersected my own. Piloerection had arrived!
I was drawn in. My hands were possessed and my eyes began devouring this tapestry of woven awe as I disappeared into a rift of time. I kept on reading like a starving sleuth desperately uncovering a new leaf!
The priestess of presence had found me and I was soul deep into a cosmic quest to make the invisible become visible. I was tapping into a deep awareness of something bigger than myself. Our bodies are made of and wrapped in the divine light of the cosmos herself. We are unique expressions of stardust. The breath of the universe flows through everything, embedded inside of every atom, organism, every living thing, drop of water, ray of light, gust of wind, and leaf of grass!
Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by American poet Walt Whitman. Whitman had come out of nowhere and had delivered the world a new form of free verse poetry with long flowing lines that had a life all of their own. Whitman transformed what poetry could be. Leaves of Grass was first published in 1855. Whitman spent most of his professional life writing and rewriting Leaves of Grass, revising it multiple times until his death in 1892.
There seems to be a close connection between poetry and spirituality. The great mystic poets were aware of a spirit-force permeating the world, breathing life into all things and connecting them as oneness. By 1850 the non indigenous and non mystical heartbeat of the western world had become disconnected. Whitman’s vivid, intense poetry spoke to an awakening into this connection of oneness. In his profoundly sacred and spiritually powerful thirteen hundred line free verse poem, The Song of Myself, Whitman invites us to “tramp a perpetual journey”. Whitman decries, “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” and a “leaf of grass is no less the journey-work of the stars”. Whitman writes of a timeless presence of the moment “now”, echoing in a divinity of higher consciousness. Whitman celebrates the unity of all, stripping away the time and space of the known to step forward into the unknown. Whitman shared, “I have said that the soul is not more than the body, and I have said that the body is not more than the soul.” A union of body and soul. Throughout Leaves of Grass, Whitman sings to the rapture of being alive as this existence of being which is a miracle all in itself. Whitman’s poetry weaved the earthly with the cosmic and the sacredness of soul with the divinity of everyday life. Oneness.
Whitman has been used as an example of awakening to a transcendence of self, connected to an awareness of oneness. Poetry itself can be a portal into a more expansive state of being. Transpersonal Psychologist Dr. Steve Taylor writes to this in his 2017 book, The Leap: The psychology of spiritual awakening. Taylor calls poetry “the out-breath of spiritual experience.” Poetry is often the evocative form that the expression of an awakening experience takes on to convey awareness and understanding beyond normal consciousness.
American humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow is best known today for his hierarchy of needs theory relating to psychological health. Maslow also studied peak experiences, self actualization and self-transcendence. In 1969 Maslow wrote in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, “The fully developed human being, working under the best conditions, tends to be motivated by values which transcend his self. They are not selfish anymore in the old sense of that term.” Self-transcendence is the expansion of one’s consciousness beyond the self, to something higher. Maslow believed that self-transcendence was more defined by peak experiences than self-actualization. These peak experiences are akin to the spiritual awakenings that Taylor researches and writes of. Maslow referred to Walt Whitman as being an example of such an expansion of being.
Walt Whitman and Maurice Bucke
Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke wrote the book, Cosmic Consciousness, in 1901. It is still in print today. Bucke, a psychiatrist, was superintendent of the provincial asylum for the insane in London, Ontario, Canada from 1877 until his death in 1902. Bucke was arguably the first to study an expansive state of being. Taylor refers to such a state as “wakefulness”. Bucke underwent his own “transformative illumination”, awakening as he described it in 1872, at the age of thirty-six, after reading poetry. He and two friends had spent the evening reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whitman. Bucke stated that “he saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is built and ordered in that all things work together for the good of each and all, that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain and that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love”. In that moment, he felt that the essence of transcendence revealed an experience that he could never forget. Bucke called this loving sense of oneness, “cosmic consciousness”, a term he borrowed from the English philosopher and poet Edward Carpenter. Bucke gathered thirty-six examples of people he believed had attained “cosmic consciousness,” including historical figures, such as the Buddha, Moses, Mohammed, and Jesus. Walt Whitman who helped to inspire Bucke’s own awakening was also on the list.
Bucke believed that modern humankind was on the evolutionary threshold of a heightened, more mystical awareness. Bucke was unknowingly only returning to the cosmic consciousness of the life-force imbued universal spirit of oneness that the western world had long since forgotten.
Bucke and Whitman became acquainted via correspondence and first met in 1877. The two became close friends with Bucke later becoming Whitman’s medical advisor and literary executor. Bucke became the poet’s first biographer and wrote the only officially authorized biography of Whitman.
That is where the synchronicities start to show up in my own life. Bucke was superintendent of the provincial asylum for the insane in London, Ontario, Canada from 1877 until his death in 1902. My London! I was born into, grew up in and was still residing in Bucke’s London, Ontario, Canada.
This story was wrapped around my life like ivy entwined on oak. In 1956 my grandfather, a Greek immigrant, took a job at the provincial asylum for the insane in London by then known as The Ontario Hospital, the same institution that Bucke had overseen. The was the same ground that Bucke and his family lived on. The same ground that Bucke died on in an accident in 1902. The same ground that Walt Whitman spent a summer visiting Bucke on in 1880. Walt Whitman was here!
My grandfather worked at the hospital for thirty plus years in various roles retiring in 1986. The very day before I was pulled into this story I had come across his retirement plaque in my basement! Chills. It gets even more tangled. Bucke actually grew up across the road from the eventual asylum site, not more than four hundred metres away. Bucke called his childhood home “Creek Farm”, in his memoirs. The farm and its contents have long since been swallowed by urban sprawl. Sit back down. In some strange dance of cosmic consciousness, I was once part owner of a Physiotherapy clinic that we opened on that very property itself in 1996 and owned until 2004.
It was not done. In a symphony of synchronicity, I was actually filling in at a clinic just down the road from both Bucke sites the next morning. I would be driving right past the farm site and past the old asylum which had closed in 2014. The former hospital and its grounds are now quite run down and slowly being dismantled. The tearing down of the walls ironically freeing old trapped ghosts to haunt film crews that still use the vacated buildings to create horror movies.
I pulled the car into the hospital driveway now an active construction site. After a little storytelling and a passionate plea for one more look at the site, a kind security guard opened the gate for a quick visit. I had not formally been on the old asylum grounds since 1981. Looking back on that day forty-two-years ago in light of this new information, it was no surprise that it was a very memorable visit. During a soccer game on a field repurposed from the grounds on the old asylum property, I experienced a bizarre aura and strange sensory changes. Eventually the aura, with its flickering lights, loss of vision, aphasia, facial and arm numbness was understood to be the gregarious announcement of a pending migraine. My ancestral inheritance on my father’s side was a rare form of hemiplegic migraine that had skipped some generations to find me once again. In family lore it was known as the blind stagger. Like a spectacular ode from Pablo Neruda these migraines arrived as a chariot of neurological fire accompanied by the graceful gift of poetry. The ghost of Walt Whitman had mysteriously arrived on the wings of words. The story of these migraines and of my own poetic Odyssean blind stagger to Ithaca is shared in my book, Cuoreosity: The heArt of Being”.
In a collision of poetry, spirituality and medicine Bucke implemented major changes at the asylum in the first few years after Whitman’s stay. Bucke referred to these changes as rehumanization, with less use of restraints and sedatives and the introduction of occupational therapy. The Chapel of Hope is the only building left at the asylum that connects back to Bucke and Whitman.
On this cold winter day in late December 2022, the twisty drive to the chapel weaved around deserted buildings and gave me goosebumps. The plaque dedicated to Bucke had long since been carried away by vandals. The historic chapel had recently been burned in an arson. Only the brick, slate and ivy shell still stood. The stained glass windows and doors long removed and the portals to the light all since boarded shut. A solitary letter J standing guard at her peak. J was the last of the twenty-six letters to be added to the English alphabet and is absent in the Latin, Greek and Hebrew alphabets. Apparently the letter J had an organizational geographic intent but spiritually J has been said to represent love and union. No aura found me that day but I drove away with a strong feeling of familiarity and the presence of my grandfather’s glowing pipe filling my senses. Oneness.
Was it a ghost or an angel that found me? Magic? What was the force behind this current storm of synchronicity? It is said that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, merely transferred to different objects. We have energy, we expend energy and we receive energy. We are the manifested life-force spirit energy of the universe. Canadian indigenous writer Richard Wagamese in his posthumous book, One Drum, speaks of communion as the act of aligning personal energy with earth energy, universal energy and, ultimately, eternal energy. We are the communion of spirit and soul. We are all one energy. We are all one soul. The cosmic consciousness of stardust fills our lungs and flows through our veins. Maybe there are moments when the energy oneness of universal consciousness breaks through our mortal filter as an annunciation and swallows us whole. Maybe we are all ghosts? Spirits in the material world.
Indeed we are one soul you and me. I am in you. Here is the deeper meaning of my relationship with you because there is nor I nor you between you and me.
Rumi
I wrote the following poem in mid June 2020 at the height of the pandemic. In that slowing down presence of silence, stillness and solitude, I felt my heart opening to the expression of my being. The mystic Sufi poet Rumi declaring “Sit quietly and listen for a voice that will say, be more silent. As that happens your soul starts to revive”. Rumi singing that all souls are one. I heard my soul calling to me. On the wings of words, heart broken loose on the wind, and soul ignited, I was swallowed by a transcendent sense of cosmic connection. I had remembered the spirit-force love and the light within. Presence of wonder. The awareness that I was a body in a soul. Breathe in deeply and slowly exhale. If you listen quietly you will hear Walt Whitman softly singing of the body electric in the spaces between the words.
Who Am I?
I am meaning I am being I witness thoughts and let them go I am the moment Freedom Possibility Are all that I know I own nothing Embrace all change I just keep breathing I am the space I am joy I am peace Pure consciousness Gratitude and grace Mindful oneness True life force I am creative Resourceful and whole Universal mind I am the source Spiritual energy An all loving soul I am limitless I have all I need I am enough Expectation free Non judgemental Nothing to find I am selfless Infinitely divine I am transcendence Wisdom hereof I am now and here Unconditional love You ask me who I am? For I am you I am you
© Jamie Millard
Spirituality is a relationship with the consciousness of the universe. The Advaita non-duality of the mystic east whirling with the divine sacred breath of the indigenous west. Spirituality is a way of seeing the cosmos in which we are simultaneously different parts of the whole as well as the whole itself. The ocean and the waves. One energy. A falcon. A storm. A never-ending song. The communion of spirit and soul. Love and light. In the world but not of it. Stardust.
Thank you for reading. Please reach out to me if I can be of any assistance on your own journey to cosmic consciousness.
Lots of love,
Jamie
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