Dr. 
Richard Maurice Bucke (18 March 1837 - 19 February 1902) (often called Maurice Bucke) was an important Canadian progressive psychiatrist in the late nineteenth century. An adventurer in his youth, he went on to study medicine, practice psychiatry, and befriend several noted men of letters. In addition to writing and delivering professional papers, Bucke wrote three book-length studies: Man's Moral Nature, Walt Whitman, and – his best known work – Cosmic Consciousness, a classic in the modern study of mystical experience.
Dr. R.M. Bucke believes that cosmic consciousness is a natural faculty of man, and that a future race of men on this earth will be born with this faculty well developed and not merely latent as it is now. Bucke's theory is that , just as man advanced from the state of simple consciousness, which he shared with animal kingdom, into a state of self-consciouness, peculiar to man alone, and marked by the development of language, so he must ineveitable come into a higher state of consciouness, distiniguished by a cosmic or universal understanding.
One selection from his book " Cosmic Consciousness " :
In contact with the flux of Cosmic Consciousness all religions known and named today will be melted down. The human soul will be revolutionized. Religion will absolutely dominate the race. It will not be believed and disbelieved.
It will not be part of life, belonging to certain hours, times, occasions. It will not be in sacred books nor in the mouths of priests. It will not dwell in churches and meetings and forms and days. Its life will not be in prayers, hymns nor discourses. It will not depend on special revelations, on the words of gods who came down to teach, nor any Bible or Bibles. It will have no mission to save men from their sins or secure them entrance into heaven. It will not teach a future immortality nor future glories, for immortality and all glory will exist in here and now. The evidence of immortality will live in every heart as sight in every eye. Doubt of God and of eternal life will be as impossible as now doubt of existance; the evidence of each will be the same. Religion will govern every minute of every day of all life. Churches, priests, forms, creeds, prayers, all agents, all intermediaries between the individual man and God will be permanantly replaced by direct unmistakable intercourse. Sin will no longer exist nor will salvation be desired. Men will not worry about death or future, about the kingdom of heaven., about what may come with and after cessation of life of the present body. Each soul will feel and know itself to be immortal, will feel and know that the entire universe with all its good and with all its beauty is for it and belongs to it forever. The world peopled by men possessing cosmic consciousness will be as far removed from the world of today as this is from the world as it was before the advent of self-consciouness ... This new race is in the act of being born from us, and in the near future it will occupy and possess the earth.
Richard Maurice Bucke (18 March 1837 - 19 February 1902) (often called Maurice Bucke) was an important Canadian progressive psychiatrist in the late nineteenth century. An adventurer in his youth, he went on to study medicine, practice psychiatry, and befriend several noted men of letters. In addition to writing and delivering professional papers, Bucke wrote three book-length studies: Man's Moral Nature, Walt Whitman, and – his best known work – Cosmic Consciousness, a classic in the modern study of mystical experience.Dr. R.M. Bucke believes that cosmic consciousness is a natural faculty of man, and that a future race of men on this earth will be born with this faculty well developed and not merely latent as it is now. Bucke's theory is that , just as man advanced from the state of simple consciousness, which he shared with animal kingdom, into a state of self-consciouness, peculiar to man alone, and marked by the development of language, so he must ineveitable come into a higher state of consciouness, distiniguished by a cosmic or universal understanding.
One selection from his book " Cosmic Consciousness " :
In contact with the flux of Cosmic Consciousness all religions known and named today will be melted down. The human soul will be revolutionized. Religion will absolutely dominate the race. It will not be believed and disbelieved.
It will not be part of life, belonging to certain hours, times, occasions. It will not be in sacred books nor in the mouths of priests. It will not dwell in churches and meetings and forms and days. Its life will not be in prayers, hymns nor discourses. It will not depend on special revelations, on the words of gods who came down to teach, nor any Bible or Bibles. It will have no mission to save men from their sins or secure them entrance into heaven. It will not teach a future immortality nor future glories, for immortality and all glory will exist in here and now. The evidence of immortality will live in every heart as sight in every eye. Doubt of God and of eternal life will be as impossible as now doubt of existance; the evidence of each will be the same. Religion will govern every minute of every day of all life. Churches, priests, forms, creeds, prayers, all agents, all intermediaries between the individual man and God will be permanantly replaced by direct unmistakable intercourse. Sin will no longer exist nor will salvation be desired. Men will not worry about death or future, about the kingdom of heaven., about what may come with and after cessation of life of the present body. Each soul will feel and know itself to be immortal, will feel and know that the entire universe with all its good and with all its beauty is for it and belongs to it forever. The world peopled by men possessing cosmic consciousness will be as far removed from the world of today as this is from the world as it was before the advent of self-consciouness ... This new race is in the act of being born from us, and in the near future it will occupy and possess the earth.
